The conquest of space still has a bright future ahead of it
A recent study suggests that the formation of a new planet in the image of our Earth is increasingly likely.
A SCIENCE FICTION SCENARIO?
Do you think the search for a new planet and a new habitat far from our beautiful blue planet is a utopia? That we only see it in the movies? It’s true that films like Interstellar have led us to believe that the chances of finding a planet similar to ours were possible. If the seventh art has always been a step ahead (and a lot of imagination), this idea is not unrealistic.
This daring assumption comes from a young team of researchers at the University of Sheffield in England. While observing the Milky Way – the English name for the Milky Way – the team discovered a group of young stars. A place where there are “groups of young stars that are less than 100 million years old…which is young for a star,” says Dr. Richard Parker of the university’s physics and astronomy department, who led the study.
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And these groups of young stars are important because, as The Astrophysical Journal points out, they contain more stars like the Sun than other regions of space where they usually form. In fact, scientists believe that planets form at the same time as the star they revolve around.
THE STARS THAT FORM PLANETS
So these young stars are brighter because they’re much more massive. And because they’re bright, their temperatures are extreme and their fusion reactions intense. So they’re the beginnings of the formation of a planet. This is of particular interest to Dr. Parker’s team of scientists. They believe that the chances of discovering the early stages of the formation of a planet like Earth are now greater.
These planets in the making are first oceans of magma as a result of collisions of rocks and grains of matter. The shock is so strong that the result is molten rock. “These magma-ocean planets are easier to detect near stars like the Sun, which are twice as heavy as average stars,” says Dr. Parker.
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So science and its technological advances should give scientists the chance to observe these special moments in our Universe. “These planets emit so much heat that we will be able to observe their glow using the next generation of infrared telescopes,” hopes Dr. Parker.
If that’s the case, it would be a remarkable step forward in observing the birth of a new planet.
Source : Phys.org
