The tools of Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) from Chile recorded what is so far the best image of a protoplanetary disk, in the history of space exploration. The tools of the set of telescopes located in the southern desert captured the polarized light of a star called HL Tauri, located 480 light years from Earth.
In the surprising image you can see the central light of the star. Around it clearly lie the elements that give shape to the disk, which in theory contains all the elements for the formation of the planets.
This scientific work was carried out by experts from Argentina, Mexico and Spain, among others. They carried out constant observation to achieve better pixels; 10 times sharper than the previous best image and 100 times better than other protoplanetary disks detected in images.
“The research team has found that the amount of polarized light is greater on one side of the disk, which is probably due to the existence of asymmetries in the distribution of dust particles or asymmetries in their properties at throughout the album,” they said from the management of ALMA de Chile.
“In addition, dust particles are not normally spherical: they can have oblate shapes, like lentils, or grains of rice. When light is emitted or reflected by dust particles, it becomes polarized, and therefore the emitted light waves always vibrate in a fixed direction rather than in random directions. The new results provided by this work suggest that dust particles behave preferentially as if they were shaped like lentils,” they added according to a review by Wired.
HL Tauri is a very young T Tauri star in the Taurus constellation, about 480 light years from Earth. Its luminosity and effective temperature imply that its age is less than 100,000 years (our Sun is 4.5 billion years old).
The star, interesting because of how young it is, is surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, a cloud of gas and dust that can give rise to planet formation. HL Tauri’s disk is one of the most studied in the sky.