Trillions of miles way, disks and gas and dust encircle baby stars just a few million years old. Rocky planetary cores form, then sweep through the disks, accreting additional material around themselves like a cardboard tube swirling through a carnival cotton-candy machine. As the protoplanets gain mass, they carve racetrack-like gaps in the gaseous disk.
How do I know this? Dan Watson told me. He’s an astronomer at the University of Rochester in New York and a member of the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) team on the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's infrared Great Observatory.
Next question — How does Dan Watson know planets are swirling around baby stars? Because the Spitzer Space Telescope told HIM so!
I’m developing a new illustration for a feature that will appear soon in Astronomy. I needed Watson to help me understand some of the finer scientific aspects of THIS piece of art distributed by NASA and the Spitzer science team.
The NASA art will be the basis for our new illustration. So I called Dan, and he patiently explained the details to me. Now I’ll work with our talented illustrators for the next month to produce the finished product.
Sometimes HOW scientists figure something out is every bit as inherently cool as WHAT they figure out. What impressed me is that the faintest trace of infrared light, broken down into its component colors by Spitzer’s spectrograph, can tell us so much.
The spectrum tells us if the system has a gap and how far from the star it lies. It tells us which solar systems are binaries (two suns). Scientists have even discovered a system with two binary systems orbiting each other — one pair with a young solar system, one without. And all of this information comes from subtle wiggles in the spectrum of infrared energy emitted by warm dust and gas encircling a distant baby star.
Pretty cool, huh? Look for it in the February issue of Astronomy.