Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2024

45 MAY-JUNE 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING VLT’s X-shooter instrument, which allowed astronomers to determine how young and how massive the stars are. The Atacama Large Mil- limeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, on the other hand, helped the team un- derstand more about the amount of dust sur- rounding some of the stars. As technology advances, the team hopes to delve even deeper into the heart of planet-forming systems. The large 39- metre mirror of ESO’s forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), for example, will enable the team to study the in- nermost regions around young stars, where rocky planets like our own might be forming. For now, these spectacu- lar images provide re- searchers with a treasure trove of data to help un- pick the mysteries of planet formation. “It is almost poetic that the processes that mark the start of the journey towards forming plan- ets and ultimately life in our own Solar System should be so beautiful,” concludes Per-Gunnar Valegård, a doctoral student at the Univer- sity of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who led the Orion study. Valegård, who is also a part-time teacher at the International School Hil- versum in the Nether- lands, hopes the images will inspire his pupils to become scientists in the future. P lanet-forming discs around young stars and their location within the gas-rich cloud of Chamaeleon I, roughly 600 light-years from Earth. The stunning images of the discs were captured using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). In total, the team observed 20 stars in the Chamaeleon I region, detecting discs around 13. The background image shows an infrared view of Chamaeleon I captured by the Herschel Space Observatory. [ESO/C. Ginski et al.; ESA/Herschel] Polarimetric High-contrast Exo- planet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) mounted on ESO’s VLT. SPHERE’s state-of-the-art extreme adaptive optics system corrects for the turbulent effects of Earth’s at- mosphere, yielding crisp images of the discs. This meant the team were able to image discs around stars with masses as low as half the mass of the Sun, which are typically too faint for most other instruments available today. Additional data for the survey were obtained using the !