Solar System Formation

[Nuke]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29932609

heres what a noob solar system looks like.

[rodion]

indeed this is an incredibly finely detailed image, especially from a target 450 ly away...modern telescopy blows my expectations away sometimes. it's incredible to be able to image such a process in the raw "as it happens" in such detail rather than as models and simulations.

[YNM]

Forget visible 'scope - let's just see the universe in infrared and radios...

[Scotius]

Awesome. I see at least 5 rings - or rather areas cleared by protoplanets. Hmm, so...what about space based radiotelescope the size of a continent?

[KerikBalm]

That is pretty awesome.

There are two well defined gaps that should correspond to 2 inner planets,

Then I see 2 circles where it gets dimmer, then two more well defined gaps -> but given the proximity of these two gaps, I suspect they will either merge, or their interaction will send one/both into a different orbit in the not too distant future (in relative terms)

Then there are another 2 gaps, again pretty close (so I dont think the resulting protoplanets would be instable orbits), and then the edge of the disk.

I wonder about the size of the star and the size of the visible disc, is it shaping up to be a red dwarf? are those inner protoplanets shaping up to be terrestrials, or gas giants? Is th disc 10 AU across? 100? etc

Edited November 7, 2014 by KerikBalm

[SuperFastJellyfish]

Wow, I didn't realize we had the ability to directly image another solar system even with different wavelengths of light besides visible. Absolutely awestruck over here.

[metaphor]

The inner two rings in that picture correspond to about the distance Jupiter and Saturn are from the Sun. So it seems this is a budding solar system much like ours.

From current models of planetary formation, gas giants form about 1-10 million years after initial collapse, before the gas gets dispersed by the newborn star, and terrestrial planets take much longer, about 100 million years. This system looks like it's in the first few million years after birth, when gas giants are just forming and clearing out their orbits but there is still gas in the disk.

edit: The article says the disk is less than a million years old.

Edited November 8, 2014 by metaphor

[Camacha]

The inner two rings in that picture correspond to about the distance Jupiter and Saturn are from the Sun. So it seems this is a budding solar system much like ours.

Remember that the current idea is that some planets migrated after the formation of the solar system, so overlaying them can be a bit dangerous.

[metaphor]

Remember that the current idea is that some planets migrated after the formation of the solar system, so overlaying them can be a bit dangerous.

That's true. According to the Grand Tack model, Jupiter migrated inwards from about 3-4 AU to about 1.5-2 AU, until Saturn pulled it back out to about 5 AU with Saturn at about 7 AU (originally around 5 AU). This all happened in the first 500,000 years after the solar system formed though. The article doesn't specify exactly how old the disk is, so it might be before or after an equivalent migration (although it looks like before, so maybe less than 100,000 years after formation).