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. "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. 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. 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. 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 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.