Observing time at the European Southern Observatory on Paranal Mountain is a very precious commodity—and yet astronomers at the Very Large Telescope in Chile spent an entire night with a high-resolution infrared camera pointed at a single object in the night sky.
They used the data to confirm that a young gas planet—presumably not unlike Jupiter in our own solar system—is orbiting the star designated HD 100546.
At “just” 335 light years away, HD 100546 is one of our near cosmic neighbors, and its age of five to ten million years makes it relatively young in astronomical terms. Like many young stars, it is surrounded by a massive disk of gas and dust.
It provides us with unique observational data on what happens when a gas giant is formed.
