An international team of researchers analyzing data captured by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) has identified a mysterious object in the vicinity of a young star located over 5,000 light-years from Earth, which they have been unable to immediately identify.
The mysterious object, which was located within a series of spiral formations in the disc of gas and dust surrounding the star called the protoplanetary disc by the VLT’s Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) instrument, may be a planet or small brown dwarf companion to star V960 Mon that did not have enough energy to become a star.
Led by Anuroop Dasgupta, a doctoral researcher at ESO and Diego Portales University, Chile, the observations follow up on a series of previous observations of V960 Mon made a couple of years ago. That study, which combined observations from the VLT’s Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), was the first to spot the swirling features. Still, those earlier observations left unanswered questions.
“That work revealed unstable material but left open the question of what happens next,” Dasgupta explained in a statement announcing the discovery of the mysterious object.
The team’s announcement comes as a companion to a study from a different research team. That effort used instruments at the VLT to make the first-ever discovery of a newly forming planet actively “carving out” similar intricate patterns in this host star’s protoplanetary disc. According to the authors of that study, scientists have previously spotted these spiral patterns. However, the new study is the first to capture a planet actively creating them, an event the researchers said could offer a glimpse into Earth’s formation.
“We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,” said Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, and the lead author of that study.
In the new study, the team analyzed new data from ERIS to try to determine what was happening. According to the team’s statement, the goal was to find any evidence that a planet pr other mysterious object was in the star’s disc.
“With ERIS, we set out to find any compact, luminous fragments signalling the presence of a companion in the disc — and we did,” says Dasgupta.
More specifically, the ERIS data showed evidence of a companion object near one of the spiral arms previously spotted by SPHERE and ALMA. The team said the data also indicated the mysterious object was most likely a planet in formation, a brown dwarf. Still, according to the team’s statement, the exact nature of the object “remains a mystery.”
In the study’s conclusion, the research team suggests that the two discoveries taken together may represent a real-world example of a theoretical process known as gravitational instability. Part of the planetary formation process, gravitational instability involves clumps of material around a young star compacting and contracting with the possibility of forming a new planet.
The study “VLT/ERIS observations of the V960 Mon system: a dust-embedded substellar object formed by gravitational instability?” was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.