News

While astronomers have discovered many thousand planets around distant stars, they have yet to find a system that closely resembles our own solar system, with rocky planets in the habitable zone and large gas giants in the outer system. The systems that were found instead show an enormous diversity, with rocky planets on orbits that takes them all the way around their star in only a few days, or super-Jupiters that are so far away from the system center that one orbit takes them hundreds of years.

One major field in modern astronomy is to try and figure out why so many different planetary systems form around stars. The answer to that tells us how common systems like our own solar system are in the Galaxy, a key question toward our understanding how much life might be out there.

Using the largest ground based telescopes from the European Southern Observatory in Chile astronomers at the Centre for Astronomy in Galway are imaging the birth places of planets around young stars. These are huge dust and gas rich disks. Recently a large survey of such planet-forming disks was completed and published in a series of three scientific papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. This survey program was lead by Dr. Christian Ginski from the Centre for Astronomy. Hear Dr. Ginski talk about the survey results here. These exciting new results were also featured by a press release of the European Southern Observatory as well as in the Irish national news at 6.

By studying the birth places of planets we can find out how planets begin to form and what influences the formation of planetary systems.

These are images of dusty disks around young stars that are hundreds of light years away from Earth. These disks are seen in near-infrared light. Beautiful ring and spiral structures indicate that planets have already started forming. These disks are 10s to 100s of astronomical units in diameter, but so far away from us that they are only as large as a pint glass in Galway as seen from the nearby town of Tuam some 40 km away (image credit: ESO/C. Ginski).