Astronomers have observed primordial material that may be giving birth to three planetary systems around a binary star in unprecedented detail.
Bringing together three decades of study, an international group of scientists have observed a pair of stars orbiting each other, to reveal that these stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust. Research published on March 10, 2022 in The Astrophysical Journal, shows the material within the newly discovered disks could be the beginnings of new planet systems which in the future orbit the binary stars. Using the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the scientific group led by Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez, a researcher at the IAA-CSIC and the UK ALMA Regional Centre (UK-ARC) at The University of Manchester, has studied the binary star SVS 13, still in its embryonic phase. This work has provided the best description available so far on a binary system in formation. Read the University of Manchester´s press release here.
Image: © Ana Karla Diaz-Rodriguez and Guillem Anglada