Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2019
32 MARCH-APRIL 2019 SPACE CHRONICLES single plane or with the equator of the star. One explanation for this is that some planets might have been affected by collisions with other objects in the system or by stars passing by the system, ejecting them from the initial plane. However, the possibility remained that the formation of planets out of the normal plane was actually caused by a warping of the star- forming cloud out of which the planets were born. Recently, im- ages of protoplanetary disks, ro- tating disks where planets form around a star, have in fact showed such warping. But it was still un- clear how early this happened. In the latest findings, published in Nature, the group from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) and Chiba University in Japan have discovered that L1527; an infant protostar still embedded within a cloud, has a disk that has two parts, an inner one rotating in one plane, and an outer one in a different plane. The disk is very young and still growing. L1527, which is about 450 light- years away in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, is a good object for study as it has a disk that is nearly edge-on to our view. According to Nami Sakai, who led the research group, “this observation shows that it is conceivable that the misalignment of planetary orbits can be caused by a warped structure formed in ALMA discovers early protostar with a warped disk by ALMA Observatory U sing the Atacama Large Mil- limeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers have observed, for the first time, a warped disk around an infant pro- tostar that formed just several tens of thousands of years ago. This implies that the misalignment of planetary orbits in many plane- tary systems, including our own, may be caused by distortions in the planet-forming disk early in their existence. The planets in the Solar System orbit the Sun in planes that are at most about seven degrees offset from the equator of the Sun itself. It has been known for some time that many extrasolar systems have planets that are not lined up in a
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