🔭 WISPIT 2b: Exoplanet Carves Gap in Birth Disk Image Credit: ESO, VLT, SPHERE; Processing & Copyright: ESO, Richelle van Capelleveen (Leiden Obs.) et al.; Text: Ogetay Kayali (MTU) apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...
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It's such an honor and a treasure to get to see whole worlds being born.
aug 30, 2025, 8:08 pm • 1 0 • view
Pretty kewl.
aug 30, 2025, 2:24 pm • 0 0 • view
That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can't look into the past and see Earth's
aug 27, 2025, 8:00 am • 7 0 • view
formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk -- the raw material of planets.
aug 27, 2025, 8:00 am • 6 0 • view
Gaps and concentric rings mark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk -- the
aug 27, 2025, 8:00 am • 13 1 • view
earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
aug 27, 2025, 8:00 am • 12 1 • view