Meet AB Aurigae b: A Jupiter-like protoplanet forming unconventionally

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through an "intense and violent process".

According to the researchers, the newly forming exoplanet is embedded in a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas with a distinct spiral structure swirling around surrounding a young star that’s estimated to be around 2 million years old.

Named 'AB Aurigae b', the newly-forming planet is probably about nine times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its host star at a whopping distance of 8.6 billion miles - that's over twice as far as Pluto is from our Sun.

Hubble finds a planet forming in an unconventional way. @HUBBLE_space has directly photographed evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through what researchers describe as an "intense and violent process." 🔗 https://t.co/XdScgtVcKd pic.twitter.com/YGOHJu1N4T

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) April 4, 2022

This discovery supports the long-debated theory of disk instability, a top-down model where a massive disk around a star cools, gravity causes the disk to rapidly break up into one or more planet-mass fragments. It also paves the way for future studies of the chemical make-up of protoplanetary disks like AB Aurigae.

"This new discovery is strong evidence that some gas giant planets can form by the disk instability mechanism. In the end, gravity is all that counts, as the leftovers of the star-formation process will end up being pulled together by gravity to form planets, one way or the other," said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C. emphasized.

Researchers directly imaged the newly forming exoplanet using Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and its Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (NICMOS).

The findings of this study are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.