Researchers stumble upon a little planet
While examining massive debris disc around CS Cha, a group of international researchers stumbled upon a little planet. Which is a few million years young and at present is in a developing phase. This tiny object may give clues on how young planets shape and then later evolve into a star. The location of the star is 600 light years away from earth. In the recent months, the subject of intense research is the circumstellar environment of this star system. The researchers spotted a dot when they looked through the pictures taken by Hubble space telescope and an exceptionally large telescope. Moreover, the photos uncovered this fact that the tiny companion moves with the binary star system.
The group of researchers which is headed by Dutch researchers belonging to Leiden University stated that the tiny little planet is in the Constellation Chameleon.
The star AT Tauri has formed two to three million years ago. CS Cha is the subject for the cosmologists who are looking for dust disc and planets in the making. Last year the team stumbled upon exactly the same thing while they were using the Spectro- Polarimetric High- Contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) device on Chile’s Exceptionally Huge Telescope. With the assistance from the telescope archives, the researchers discovered the same dot (which was much fainter) in photographs which were taken 19 years ago with the Hubble Space Telescope and then 11 years ago with the exceptionally large telescope.
The press release of Leiden University press stated that due to the old photographs, the astronomers were able to show that they the companion and binary belong to together and they move together.
Further, no details have been revealed and scientists have not yet decided how the tiny companion looks like and how it was formed. The lead study author Christian Ginski made a statement in which he said that they suspect that the tiny companion is surrounded by its own dust disc, and the tricky part is that the major part of the light is blocked by the disc and that’s why determining the mass of the companion is tough. So, it can either be a brown dwarf or it can also be a super- Jupiter in its toddler years, then he later said that the classical planet-forming models cannot help them.
Researchers are planning to examine the star and its companion in a greater detail by using the international ALMA telescope which is located on the Chajnantor plateau in the North of Chilean Andes.
