Astronomers says two telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and a radio telescope array in Chile known as ALMA, have captured dramatic images of a multiple star system known as XZ Tauri -- including a vivid image of a neighboring young star with planets forming around it.
Hubble images show XZ Tauri ejecting a bubble of hot gas through the space surround the system, creating beautiful, bright clumps emitting strong jets and winds, illuminating the entire region and creating a dramatic scene.
While XZ Tauri, located 450 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Taurus, appears in some images as a single star, it has long been understood to be a binary, our double, star.
Now astronomers say one of that pair may itself be a binary, resulting in a three-star system.
Hubble has turned it eye on XZ Tauri before, from 1995 to 2000, when it first spotted the bubble of hot gas expanding outward from the system, triggering rippling shock waves and pulses of light over billions of miles as it plows into slower-moving material.
In an even more dramatic development, the ALMA instrument looking at the nearby star HL Tau has provided the clearest image ever captured of planets forming in the vast disc of gas and dust surrounding a young star.
Because the dust cloud obscures attempts to view the planet formation in visible light, astronomers turned to ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope, which captured high-resolution images of the star and its planets at longer wavelengths.
It clearly shows gaps in the huge ring of dust and gas, swept clear of material by the new planets forming in their orbits around the star.
"Most of what we know about planet formation today is based on theory," says Tim de Zeeuw with the European Southern Observatory, one of several organizations operating ALMA. "Images with this level of detail have up to now been relegated to computer simulations or artist's impressions."
The image represents a look into the past of our own solar system, the astronomers say, mirroring what our home system might have looked like more than 4 billion years ago.
One surprise, they say, is finding such planet formation happening around a star as young as HL Tauri.
"HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets," says Catherine Vlahakis, ALMA Deputy Program Scientist.
"This one image alone will revolutionize theories of planet formation," she says.
