An international team of scientists have discovered new evidence that planets are forming around a star about 335 light years from Earth.
The study led by a Clemson University astrophysicist found carbon monoxide emission that strongly suggests a planet is orbiting a relatively young star known as HD100546. The candidate planet is the second that astronomers have discovered orbiting the star.
Sean Brittain, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Clemson, said that new discoveries from the star could allow astronomers to test their theories and learn more about the formation of solar systems, including our own.
Brittain said that this system is very close to Earth relative to other disk systems and he's able to study it at a level of detail that you can't do with more distant stars. This is the first system where we've been able to do this and once they really understand what's going on, the tools that we are developing can then be applied to a larger number of systems that are more distant and harder to see.
The star is about 2.5 times larger and 30 times brighter than the sun and is in the constellation Musca, or The Fly, and can only be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
The new planet astronomers believe they have found what would be an uninhabitable gas giant at least three times the size of Jupiter, Brittain said. Its distance from the star would be about the same distance that Saturn is from the sun.
The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
