Photo gallery is part of an extensive study of 44 young and massive stars captured in near-infrared light by astronomers using the Gemini Planet Camera (GPI), what was achieved to pinpoint, some of the dusty disks of planet formation, which have great potential to become a new solar system.

In the study, it was identified that disks around stars up to three times the mass of the Sun tend to produce rings, whereas disks around stars larger than 3 solar masses do not tend to produce rings. This suggests that more massive stars could form planets in slightly different ways.

According to the official website of the Chilean National Astronomical Development Fund, Gemini is an astronomy international cooperation project with participation United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. The goal is the operation of two 8.1-meter telescopes, one located at Cerro Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, United States, and the other, at Cerro Pachón, in Region IV Chile.

Both the telescope and their respective instrumentation are designed to obtain the highest quality images of the universe, aided in large part by the excellent atmospheric conditions in these places: Cerro Pachón at 2,700 meters and Mauna Kea at 4,200 meters.

Planet formation, on the other hand, is due to the disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars that are several million years old. Interestingly, the GPI is one of the few artifacts with the ability to distinguish these disks. In addition, it is known that rings formed by gas and dust grains of different sizes are often seen in these disks, but what is not clear is what constitutes these rings, but it is believed that it is thanks to the newly formed planet interacting with the disk.

What Gemini South captured was an image of the disc in polarized light and near-infrared and found the disc around it 80% of the 44 stars studied, apart from a new planet candidate (around the star V1295 Aquilae), and three brown dwarfs. Astronomers researchers intend with the Gemini-LIGHTS (Gemini-Large Imaging with GPI Herbig/T-Tauri Survey) study to resolve doubts through images as a high-resolution instrument that is a sample of a disk surrounding a total of 44 different stars. .

“We wanted to answer fundamental questions about how planets formed,” explains Evan Rich, lead author of the scientific paper describing the results, published in The Astronomical Journal. The scientist who is also a postdoc at the University of Michigan explains that the Gemini-LIGHTS study “focused on stars that are more massive than the Sun to investigate the influence of the mass of the parent star on the star formation process.”