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Planet formation

Grainy pictures of new worlds

Nature volume 393, pages 117–118 (1998)Cite this article

We know that planetary bodies in our Solar System began by agglomeration of dust grains, rocks and mountain-sized asteroids. We also know that most of the work was done during the first 10 million years (Myr) after the Sun's birth, when the young star was encircled by an immense disk of grains and gas. But to go beyond this is not easy. Some 4.5 billion years after the main event, examination of our neighbouring worlds may never allow us to reconstruct fully how the Sun's early disk evolved into gaseous behemoths such as Jupiter and small rocky planets such as Earth. We must look elsewhere for better clues to our origins, and we find them in new studies of disks around three stars by Holland et al.1, and of a disk surrounding the star HR4796A by Jura et al.2, Jayawardhana et al.3 and Koerner et al.4.

Dust grains orbiting a star are bathed in the star's radiation field, and re-radiate this light at millimetre and infrared wavelengths. Holland et al.1 used an array of millimetre-wave detectors to map the distribution of grains in disks around the nearby stars β Pictoris, Fomalhaut and Vega. β Pic is between 10 and 100 Myr old, Fomalhaut is around 200 Myr, and Vega is the oldest at 350 Myr. So with the possible exception of β Pic, each disk is now far beyond the main era of planet-building, and the grains are thought to be debris generated by collisions of asteroids formed earlier on.

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Figure 1: An edge-on disk around the young star HR4796A.

NASA/JPL/CALTECH

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  1. the Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, MS 105-24, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Vincent Mannings

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  1. Vincent Mannings
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Mannings, V. Grainy pictures of new worlds. Nature 393, 117–118 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/30102

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