Australian astronomers discover 5 new planets

Australian astronomers and many foreign collaborators have discovered five newly formed planets, including some considered the "youngest" ever discovered.

According to a report by the Vietnam News Agency in Sydney, Monash University (Australia) announced on May 14 that through a revolutionary technique, astronomers from this country and many foreign collaborators have discovered five newly formed planets, including some considered the "youngest" planets ever discovered.

According to a Monash University press release, the innovative technique developed by researchers at the institution uses advanced imaging to detect planets previously hidden in the gas and dust of young solar systems.

Part of the global exoALMA project, the discovery was made using the world's largest telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), located in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Unlike traditional methods of finding planets by detecting their light, exoALMA identifies subtle disturbances that planets create in the surrounding gas and dust.

Monash University astrophysicist and principal investigator of the project, Professor Christophe Pinte, who has been developing the new technique for seven years, likened the discovery of five new planets to trying to spot a fish by looking for ripples on the surface of a pond, rather than trying to see the fish itself.

The technique allows scientists to find planets that are just a few million years old, about 1,000 times younger than Earth, to gain insight into the early stages of planet formation.

Professor Daniel Price stressed that these findings mark a major step forward in understanding the origin of planets.

To date, researchers have discovered more than 5,000 extrasolar planets, but all are mature systems, leaving researchers with little understanding of how they formed and why they are so different from our solar system./.

(Vietnam+)

Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/cac-nha-thien-van-australia-phat-hien-5-hanh-tinh-moi-post1038576.vnp