A planet in progress?

Astrophysicists observe a circumstellar disk with telltale signs of planet formation

An object appears to be forming from gas and dust around the star AB Aurigae. Click here for more information.

Scientists are one step closer to understanding how new planets form, thanks to research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and carried out by a team of astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History.

Ben R. Oppenheimer, assistant curator in the museum's Department of Astrophysics, and his colleagues have used the Lyot Project coronograph attached to a U.S. Air Force telescope on Maui, Hawaii, to construct an image of material that seems to be coalescing into a body from the gas and dust cloud surrounding AB Aurigae, a well-studied star. The body is either a planet or a brown dwarf--something with mass between a star or a planet. Brown dwarfs have been found orbiting stars since a team that included Oppenheimer first discovered one in 1995.

The research results, accepted for publication in June's Astrophysical Journal, represent a significant step toward direct imaging and the study of exoplanets, which orbit stars other than the Sun, and may advance theories of planet and brown dwarf formations.