Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2020

17 raises an exciting prospect: there could be an unknown population of exoplanets that orbit their stars on very inclined and distant orbits. SPACE CHRONICLES The new research also reveals that this inner ring contains 30 Earth- masses of dust, which could be enough to form planets. “Any plan- ets formed within the misaligned ring will orbit the star on highly oblique orbits and we predict that many planets on oblique, wide-sep- aration orbits will be discovered in future planet imaging campaigns, for instance with the ELT,” says team member Alexander Kreplin of the University of Exeter, referring to ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, which is planned to start operating later this decade. Since more than half the stars in the sky are born with one or more companions, this A LMA, in which ESO is a partner, and the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have imaged GW Orionis, a triple star system with a pecu- liar inner region. The new observations revealed that this object has a warped planet-forming disc with a misaligned ring. In particular, the SPHERE image (right panel) allowed astronomers to see, for the first time, the shadow that this ring casts on the rest of the disc. This helped them figure out the 3D shape of the ring and the overall disc. The left panel shows an artistic impression of the inner region of the disc, including the ring, which is based on the 3D shape recon- structed by the team. [ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.]