Hubble finds a new Jupiter-like planet

In news– Recently, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has directly photographed evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming.

Key updates-

This discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form, called “disk instability,”.
The disk instability model is for giant planet formation where a protoplanetary disk becomes dense and cool enough to be unstable to gravitational collapse and thereby resulting in the formation of a gaseous protoplanet.
A protoplanetary or circumstellar disc is a disc of gas and dust orbiting a newly formed star, out of which planets are hypothesized to form.
According to the Disk Instability theory, matter slowly moves inwards in this disc as dust particles grow to centimeter-sized pebbles.
This is seen as the first step towards the formation of kilometer-sized planetesimals that eventually come together to form planets.
The newly forming planet captured by Hubble is called AB Aurigae b and embedded in a protoplanetary disk with distinct spiral structures swirling around and surrounding a young star that is estimated to be about 2 million years old.
That is also about the same age our solar system was when planet formation was underway.
This protoplanet is probably around nine times the size of Jupiter and orbits its host star at a distance of 8.6 billion miles, over two times the distance between our Sun and pluto.
This new discovery presents strong evidence that some gas giant planets can form by the disk instability mechanism.
The observations are also in striking contrast to the expectation of planet formation by the widely accepted core accretion model.
Hubble provided a time baseline, combined with Subaru data, of 13 years, which was sufficient to be able to detect orbital motion.
This discovery also paves the way for future studies into the chemical composition of protoplanetary discs like AB Aurigae b.

Jupiter-

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system.
Jupiter is so large that all of the other planets in the solar system could fit inside it. More than 1,300 Earths would fit inside Jupiter.
It is the fifth planet from the sun and its average distance from the sun is 5.2 astronomical units, or AU.
When viewed from Earth, Jupiter is usually the second brightest planet in the night sky, after Venus.
The planet is named after Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods in mythology.
It is also called a gas giant planet and its atmosphere is made up of mostly hydrogen gas and helium gas, like the sun.
The planet is covered in thick red, brown, yellow and white clouds and the clouds make the planet look like it has stripes.
One of Jupiter’s most famous features is the Great Red Spot, a giant spinning storm, resembling a hurricane.
It rotates, or spins, faster than any other planet.
One rotation equals one day and Jupiter’s day is only about 10 hours long.
Its orbit around the sun is elliptical, or oval-shaped.
Jupiter takes 12 Earth years to make one revolution around the sun, so one year on Jupiter is equal to 12 years on Earth.
It has 53 named moons. Scientists have discovered 26 more but those do not have official names.
Hence Scientists now think Jupiter has 79 moons and the most recent moons were discovered in 2017.
The planet’s four largest moons are Ganymede, Callisto, Io (eye-OH), and Europa.
These four moons are called the Galilean satellites as Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered these moons in 1610.
The largest of Jupiter’s moons is Ganymede. It is the largest moon in the solar system and is larger than the planet Mercury and three-fourths the size of Mars.
Ganymede is the only moon in the solar system known to have its own magnetic field. Ganymede and Callisto have many craters and appear to be made of ice and rocky material.