With help from one of Earth's most powerful telescopes, an international team of astronomers has taken a spectacular snapshot of a newborn planet emerging from the disk of gas and debris surrounding its host star.

The first-of-its-kind image — included in new research to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics — shows an alien world known as PDS 70b that orbits a dwarf star some 370 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

This is a baby picture of sorts, but PDS 70b isn't especially cute or cuddly. It's a gas giant more massive than Jupiter and, with a surface temperature of roughly 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), it's hotter than any planet in our solar system.

And if the picture itself is unique, it's what it shows that has the astronomers excited.

"This confirms our picture of planet formation, namely that planets, while accumulating material from their environment, carve a gap in the disk," Miriam Keppler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and the leader of the team, told NBC News MACH in an email. "While discovering how planet formation takes place around other stars, we learn as well about the history of our own solar system."

A chart of the southern constellation of Centaurus and most of the stars visible to the unaided eye on a clear dark night. The dwarf star PDS 70 is marked with a red circle. ESO / IAU and Sky amd Telescope

The image shows PDS 70b as a bright yellowish blob near its host star, PDS 70, which is obscured by a black disk known as a coronagraph that astronomers use to keep a star's bright light from washing out much dimmer planets. In reality, PDS 70b lies some 3 billion kilometers (about 1.86 billion miles) from PDS 70, or roughly the distance from Uranus to the sun.

Other images have shown planetlike features in the disks around their host stars, but it was always hard to tell for sure that the features represented actual planets.

"This is the first time we’ve been able to see a planet embedded in a gas disk around a young star," Heather Knutson, a professor of planetary science at Caltech in Pasadena, California, said in an email. "Gas giant planets like this one form on a timescale of several million years, but they are hidden from view during most of this period due to the presence of the gas disk."

The image was captured by SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument attached to the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert. Six one- to two-hour observations were made of the planet and its host star between 2012 and 2018, Keppler said in the email. Algorithms were then used to remove the bright light of PDS 70, which is about 5,000 times brighter than PDS 70b and which otherwise would have overwhelmed the light from the planet.

"The technique the scientists used is ingenious, pulling the faint image of the planet out of the surrounding image of the swirling protoplanetary disk," Jay Pasachoff, a Williams College astronomer who wasn't involved in the new research, said in an email.

"It’s a very interesting and pretty convincing result — a solid detection,” Bruce Macintosh, a physicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, told the journal Science.

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FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.</s>This image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70.

Astronomers say they have captured the first confirmed image of a planet being born.

Astronomers led by a group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, said it used SPHERE — an instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope that can seek out planets — to snap an image of gas and dust forming near a young star.

The team also learned about the planet’s properties by measuring its brightness at different wavelengths.

The planet is about 3 billion kilometers away from the star, which is roughly the same distance between the sun and Uranus.

"These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them," said Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in a statement.

The star has been named PDS 70, with its corresponding new planet dubbed PDS 70b. In the image, the planet is shown to the right of the dark center of the image as a bright point, said astronomers. The center of the image contains a coronagraph which blocks the bright light of the central star.

An analysis shows PDS 70b is a giant gas planet with a mass a few times larger than Jupiter. The planet has a surface temperature of around 1000°C. By comparison, the hottest planet in our solar system, Venus, reaches a temperature of 462°C.

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More: Could humans live on Mars? 'Absolutely,' a NASA expert says</s>For the first time, a planet's birth has been captured in an image released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The image was shot by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) that the ESO operates.

The planet was found forming in the vicinity of young dwarf star PDS 70. It has been named PDS70b and it was seen cutting through the "planet forming material" in the star's vicinity. The VLT's SPHERE instruments detected it while also measuring the brightness of said planet at different light wavelengths. This allowed other properties of its atmosphere to be deduced accurately, notes a report put out by the ESO. VLT is one of the largest and most powerful telescopes on Earth.

This is not the first time that planet formation has been detected; theories of how planets are formed have been in place for decades now. Planets are formed when massive clouds of dust and matter that swirls around stars fuse, attracting more matter as it gets larger. PDS70b, notes the report, is doing just that.

The planet is about three billion kilometre from its central star, about the same distance as Uranus to the Sun. The planet is a gas giant several times the size of Jupiter, says the ESO.

70b also has a surface temperature that exceeds 1000 degrees C, it being a new planet an all- it is a lot hotter than the planets here in the Solar System.

Researchers also explained that the dark circle in the centre of the image is a filter to block out the light. The star's bright light would have otherwise made it impossible to detect the planet's formation.

Miriam Keppler, lead astronomer who was able to detect PDS 70's planet explains that, "These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them. The problem is that until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been features in the disc."</s>July 2 (UPI) -- The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has captured detailed imagery of a newborn planet carving a path through the protoplanetary disk surrounding PDS 70, a young dwarf star.

According to ESO, the observations -- captured by SPHERE, VLT's planet-hunting instrument -- included the "first confirmed image of a planet caught in the act of forming in the dusty disc surrounding a young star."

The telescope's SPHERE instrument was able to observe the exoplanet at multiple wavelengths, revealing the young planet's atmosphere.

The observations suggest PDS 70b is a giant gas planet several times more massive than Jupiter. The exoplanet boasts a surface temperature of roughly 1000 degrees Celsius, more than twice as hot as Mercury, the hottest planet in our solar system.

SPHERE uses multi-wavelength observations, a coronagraph and a technique called high-contrast imaging to filter out the signal of faint exoplanets circling bright stars. The coronagraph, which appears as a dark circle in the middle of the VLT image, works to block out the bright light of the host star -- emissions that would otherwise overwhelm the telescope's ability to photograph and analyze the characteristics of the protoplanetary disk.

The new image suggests the newborn planet has created sizable gaps in the protoplanetary disk.

"Keppler's results give us a new window onto the complex and poorly-understood early stages of planetary evolution," André Müller, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a news release. "We needed to observe a planet in a young star's disc to really understand the processes behind planet formation."

Data revealing the chemical makeup of the exoplanet's atmosphere will help scientists model the gas giant's formation and early evolution.

Scientists detailed their discovery and analysis of PDS 70b in a pair of papers, soon to be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.</s>A planet-hunting instrument has captured the first confirmed image of a newborn planet that’s still forming in our galaxy.

To the right of the black circle at the center of the image, the round bright planet can be seen within the disk of gas and dust around the young dwarf star PDS 70. Of course, the center isn’t naturally this dark. Instead, the researchers used a coronagraph to block the bright light of the star in order to look at the disk and the planet.

It’s carving out a path through the disk around the star, which is in the Centaurus constellation. The protoplanetary disk is the “planet factory” full of gas and dust around young stars. The planet was found in a gap in this disk, which means it is close to where it was born and still growing by accumulating material from the disk.

The planet, dubbed PDS 70b, was detected by an international team using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and its planet-hunting instrument, called SPHERE. The instrument is considered to be one of the most powerful planet hunters in existence.

The discovery by two teams of researchers is detailed in two papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Monday.

“These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, who led one team, said in a statement. “The problem is that until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been features in the disc.”

André Müller, also with the Max Planck institute and leader of the second team, said in a statement that “Keppler’s results give us a new window onto the complex and poorly-understood early stages of planetary evolution. We needed to observe a planet in a young star’s disc to really understand the processes behind planet formation.”

SPHERE was able to measure the planet’s brightness at different wavelengths, which enabled the researchers to determine the properties of its atmosphere.

This is incredibly challenging, because even though SPHERE used the coronagraph to block the star, it had to seek out the planet’s signal in multiple ways.

Researchers were able to determine that it’s a giant gas planet and has a blisteringly hot surface temperature of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. This is at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, the largest gas giant in our solar system, and well above the highest temperature recorded on any planet in our solar system.

They also deduced that it has a cloudy atmosphere.

Although the planet looks close to its star in the image, it’s 1,864,113 miles away. That’s the same distance as Uranus from our sun. It takes the planet 120 years to orbit the star, which fits with astronomers’ predictions that gas giants would need to form quite far from their stars.

Directly imaging the planet is a game-changer. Going forward, researchers will be able test models of how planets form and learn more about the history of how the earliest planetary systems formed, like our own solar system.

“After more than a decade of enormous efforts to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE enables us to reap the harvest with the discovery of baby planets!” Thomas Henning, director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and leader of the teams, said in a statement.</s>It's not every day you see a newborn planet being formed out of the ether of gas and debris. Actually it's the first day. And it's incredible.

Above is footage taken by European Southern Observatory using, the aptly named "Very Large Telescope" in Chile, one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet. The footage in itself is incredible. Perhaps even more incredible is the final image:

Then eventually to this:

Just to the right of the black dot (it's called a coronagraph and is used to make sure lights from stars don't block our view of planets) is PDS 70b, which is located roughly 370 light-years from Earth.

This is literally an image of a planet emerging from a disk of gas and debris. According to Scientists, PDS 70b is bigger than Jupiter and currently has a surface temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius.

You can find out more about planet PDS 70b here.

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'Hello, humans': Google's Duplex could make Assistant the most lifelike AI yet.</s>Astronomers have found more than 2,000 confirmed planets in the universe, but scientists say a new image is the first showing the birth of a planet.

Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, scientists have captured an image of the formation of a gas giant planet orbiting a very young star.

The star is PDS 70, in the direction of the southern constellation Centaurus. Using a method that basically blocks out the brightness of the new star, scientists were able to view the formation of the planet named PDS 70b, making its way through a massive disc of stellar dust.



“These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them,” said Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany in a press release. “The problem is that until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been features in the disc.”

The image shows a bright spot to the lower right of the blacked-out star. The planet is about 3 billion km away from the star, or about the distance of Uranus to the sun.

Since the initial observation, more studies have allowed scientists to measure more details about the planet including its temperature of around 1,000 degrees Celsius, which is hotter than any of the planets in our solar system. Its size is also more than three times larger than Jupiter.

Other details that are part of a followup investigation led by André Müller include the conclusion the planet has a cloudy atmosphere.

“Keppler’s results give us a new window onto the complex and poorly-understood early stages of planetary evolution,” said Müller. “We needed to observe a planet in a young star’s disc to really understand the processes behind planet formation.”

Further efforts will allow scientists to test theoretical models of planet formation. Details of the discovery will be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.</s>SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile captured this image showing the birth of a new planet. The new planet, now known as PDS 70b, is the bright spot to the right of the black circle in the center.

Astronomers believe PDS 70b is a giant gas planet with a mass a few times the size of Jupiter and a surface temperature of about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, making it much hotter than any planet in our solar system.

The new star formed alongside the young dwarf star known as PDS 70, but “alongside” is a relative term – the distance between the star and the new young planet is roughly 3 billion kilometers, about the distance between Uranus and the Sun.</s>For these papers, a German-led team of scientists managed to capture images of the disc and the planet around PDS 70 thanks to a coronagraph on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. A coronagraph uses a mask to block out the bright light from the star, the way you might use your hand to block out the sun when looking for something overhead. This allowed astronomers to study the disc and discover a planet in its midst.</s>Astronomers say they've captured the first confirmed image of a planet forming in the dust swirling around a young star.(Source: European Southern Observatory)

BERLIN (AP) - Astronomers say they've captured the first confirmed image of a planet forming in the dust swirling around a young star.

Scientists said Monday the planet appears as a bright spot in the snapshot taken using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Miriam Kepler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany said hints of baby planets have been detected before, but astronomers weren't sure whether those observations might simply be features in the swirling dust.

In a paper to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, scientists describe the planet, located about 1.86 billion miles from the star PDS 70, as a gas giant bigger than Jupiter. They say it has a cloudy atmosphere and a surface temperature of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope captures an image of PDS 70b, making it the first clear image of a planet forming from the disk of gas and debris surrounding its host star.