While observing a star in the constellation Monoceros, scientists were “blinded” by a sudden increase in brightness by 20 times due to the emergence of unique objects.
According to Sci-News, a group of international scientists monitoring the star V960 Mon in the Monoceros constellation, located 5,000 light-years from Earth, encountered this “blinding” event in 2014.
Believing they had captured something unusual, they enlisted the support of the world’s leading observatories to continue tracking the object for several years in an effort to find answers.
The strange and chaotic phenomenon observed by two telescopes was the planets in their moment of birth – (Photo: ESO/ALMA).
Using the SPHERE instrument mounted on the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), they discovered a mysterious gathering of complex spiral arms around V960 Mon, extending over a distance greater than the diameter of the Solar System.
By also utilizing ALMA, the world’s most powerful radio telescope array located in the Atacama Desert of Chile, they found that these spiral arms were in the process of fragmentation leading to the formation of unusual clumps.
There was only one answer that matched all the data, and it represented a once-in-a-millennium moment in astronomical observation.
“This discovery is truly fascinating as it marks the first detection of clumps around a young star capable of forming giant planets“ – said Associate Professor Alice Zurlo from Diego Portales University (Chile).
The lead author, Philipp Weber, also from Diego Portales University, stated that it was the first observation of gravitational instability on a planetary scale.
This means that the objects astronomers are observing are protoplanets right at their moment of birth: the material around the young star will eventually collapse and coalesce, leading to the gradual formation of a planet.
“The sizes of these obscure clumps that are slowly coalescing suggest that the future planets must be as large as Jupiter – the largest planet in the Solar System” – noted in the publication in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
