According to the Nebula Hypothesis, stars and their systems of planets form from giant clouds of dust and gas. After undergoing gravitational collapse at the center (which creates the star), the remaining matter then forms an accretion disk in orbit around it. Over time, this matter is fed to the star – allowing it to become more massive – and also leads to the creation of a system of planets.
And until this week, the Nebula Hypothesis was just that. Given the distance involved, and the fact that the formation of star systems takes billions of years, being able to witness the process at various stages is quite difficult. But thanks to the efforts of team of researchers from the U.S. and Taiwan, astronomers have now captured the first clear image of a young star surrounded by an accretion disk.
As they explained in their paper – “First Detection of Equatorial Dark Dust Lane in a Protostellar Disk at Submillimeter Wavelength“, which was recently published in the journal Science Advances – these disks are difficult to resolve spatially because of their small sizes. However, by using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) – which offers unprecedented
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