Scientists capture birth of a giant planet

Using European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, an international team of scientists studied the disc of gas and dust that surrounds the young star HD 100546, a relatively nearby neighbour located 335 light-years from

Earth.

Scientists were surprised to find what seems to be a planet in the process of being formed, still embedded in the disc of material around the young star. The candidate planet would be a gas giant similar to Jupiter.

"So far, planet formation has mostly been a topic tackled by computer simulations," said lead researcher Sascha Quanz from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

"If our discovery is indeed a forming planet, then for the first time scientists will be able to study the planet formation process and the interaction of a forming planet and

its natal environment empirically at a very early stage," Quanz said.

HD 100546 is a well-studied object, and it has already been suggested that a giant planet orbits about six times further from the star than Earth is from the Sun. The newly found planet candidate is located in the outer regions of the system, about ten times further out.

The planet candidate around HD 100546 was detected as a faint blob located in the circumstellar disc revealed using the NAOS-CONICA (NACO) adaptive optics instrument on the telescope, combined with pioneering data

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