Prof Arnab Bhattacharya, Prof Ajit Kembhavi, Chief guest Prof Ajay Kumar Sood, Prof Aniket Sule during the opening ceremony of 18th International Olymopiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai on August 12, 2025.
| Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI

New Delhi:

Astronomers from India have made an intriguing discovery in a unique tri-star solar system located 489 light years from Earth. The discovery will help astrophysicists get a better understanding of planetary formations.

Astronomers from the National Institute of Science Education and Research or NISER in Odisha have made the discovery using the advanced radio telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Their observations, sustained over a period of time, reveal fascinating insights into the complexities of planetary formation.

The three-star system that was being observed was the ‘GG Tau A’ solar system which is in its nascent stage of planetary formations. The system is believed to be around 5 million years old. What makes it unique is that there are three ‘Suns’ with a massive protoplanetary disk – a rotating disk of gas and dust that forms around a young star and provides the materials for new planets to form.

Because the three stars orbit each other, the giant ring of gas and dust, which over time will form planets, get significantly altered due to the gravity of the stars in their orbiting pattern, giving scientists fascinating insights.

WHAT THE INDIAN ASTRONOMERS HAVE DISCOVERED

The team of astronomers from NISER was led by scientist Liton Majumdar, who is also a visiting scientist at NASA. His area of specialisation is star and planetary formations, astrochemistry, and exoplanet studies.

His team and he have detected molecular emissions from the protoplanetary disk which are the fundamental building blocks of planets. These emissions were found to originate in the coldest and most dense regions of the star system.

The team of researchers carried out their research in these coldest parts of the tri-star system, where temperatures are believed to be as low as 16 Kelvin or -257.15 degrees Celsius – well below the freezing point of carbon monoxide – key for scientists to trace the mass of gas during the formation of planets. The chemical composition of carbon monoxide – CO – carries carbon and oxygen, and reacts with other gases to form compounds like CH4 (methane). Its bright color helps astronomers model protoplanetary disks.

INSIGHTS FROM THE DISCOVERY

While scientists have been studying single star solar systems like our own, and also binary star systems like Alpha Centauri, understanding the complexities of a tri-star system is unique, and with the GG Tau A star system being as close to our solar system helps answer key questions in astrophysics.

It also helps understand the fundamental nature of planetary formation under the complications caused due to the gravity of three host stars.

Gravity, temperature, mass (energy), pressure and frequency are key aspects of physics and studying these in a three-star system gives scientists a challenge and an opportunity to make groundbreaking discoveries in such complex conditions.

THE RADIO TELESCOPE IN ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE

The astronomers from India used the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment or APEX radio telescope – one of the highest telescopes on Earth – located at a height of 5,064 meters above sea level in the Atacama desert in Chile.

The facility is built and operated by three European research institutes – The European Southern Observatory, The Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and The Onsala Space Observatory.

The APEX telescope is a modified ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) prototype antenna and is at the site of the ALMA observatory.

The ALMA telescope, also located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, is an astronomical interferometer of 66 radio telescopes which observe the electromagnetic radiation from space at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.
 

New Delhi:

Astronomers from India have made an intriguing discovery in a unique tri-star solar system located 489 light years from Earth. The discovery will help astrophysicists get a better understanding of planetary formations.

Astronomers from the National Institute of Science Education and Research or NISER in Odisha have made the discovery using the advanced radio telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Their observations, sustained over a period of time, reveal fascinating insights into the complexities of planetary formation.

The three-star system that was being observed was the ‘GG Tau A’ solar system which is in its nascent stage of planetary formations. The system is believed to be around 5 million years old. What makes it unique is that there are three ‘Suns’ with a massive protoplanetary disk – a rotating disk of gas and dust that forms around a young star and provides the materials for new planets to form.

Because the three stars orbit each other, the giant ring of gas and dust, which over time will form planets, get significantly altered due to the gravity of the stars in their orbiting pattern, giving scientists fascinating insights.

WHAT THE INDIAN ASTRONOMERS HAVE DISCOVERED

The team of astronomers from NISER was led by scientist Liton Majumdar, who is also a visiting scientist at NASA. His area of specialisation is star and planetary formations, astrochemistry, and exoplanet studies.

His team and he have detected molecular emissions from the protoplanetary disk which are the fundamental building blocks of planets. These emissions were found to originate in the coldest and most dense regions of the star system.

The team of researchers carried out their research in these coldest parts of the tri-star system, where temperatures are believed to be as low as 16 Kelvin or -257.15 degrees Celsius – well below the freezing point of carbon monoxide – key for scientists to trace the mass of gas during the formation of planets. The chemical composition of carbon monoxide – CO – carries carbon and oxygen, and reacts with other gases to form compounds like CH4 (methane). Its bright color helps astronomers model protoplanetary disks.

INSIGHTS FROM THE DISCOVERY

While scientists have been studying single star solar systems like our own, and also binary star systems like Alpha Centauri, understanding the complexities of a tri-star system is unique, and with the GG Tau A star system being as close to our solar system helps answer key questions in astrophysics.

It also helps understand the fundamental nature of planetary formation under the complications caused due to the gravity of three host stars.

Gravity, temperature, mass (energy), pressure and frequency are key aspects of physics and studying these in a three-star system gives scientists a challenge and an opportunity to make groundbreaking discoveries in such complex conditions.

THE RADIO TELESCOPE IN ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE

The astronomers from India used the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment or APEX radio telescope – one of the highest telescopes on Earth – located at a height of 5,064 meters above sea level in the Atacama desert in Chile.

The facility is built and operated by three European research institutes – The European Southern Observatory, The Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, and The Onsala Space Observatory.

The APEX telescope is a modified ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) prototype antenna and is at the site of the ALMA observatory.

The ALMA telescope, also located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, is an astronomical interferometer of 66 radio telescopes which observe the electromagnetic radiation from space at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.
 

Washington:

Astronomers have spotted orbiting around a young star a newborn planet that took only 3 million years to form – quite swift in cosmic terms – in a discovery that challenges the current understanding of the speed of planetary formation.

This infant world, estimated at around 10 to 20 times the mass of Earth, is one of the youngest planets beyond our solar system – called exoplanets – ever discovered. It resides alongside the remnants of the disk of dense gas and dust circling the host star – called a protoplanetary disk – that provided the ingredients for the planet to form.

The star it orbits is expected to become a stellar type called an orange dwarf, less hot and less massive than our sun. The star’s mass is about 70% that of the sun and it is about half as luminous. It is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 520 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

“This discovery confirms that planets can be in a cohesive form within 3 million years, which was previously unclear as Earth took 10 to 20 million years to form,” said Madyson Barber, a graduate student in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.

“We don’t really know how long it takes for planets to form,” UNC astrophysicist and study co-author Andrew Mann added. “We know that giant planets must form faster than their disk dissipates because they need a lot of gas from the disk. But disks take 5 to 10 million years to dissipate. So do planets form in 1 million years? 5? 10?”

The planet, given the names IRAS 04125+2902 b and TIDYE-1b, orbits its star every 8.8 days at a distance about one-fifth that separating our solar system’s innermost planet Mercury from the sun. Its mass is in between that of Earth, the largest of our solar system’s rocky planets, and Neptune, the smallest of the gas planets. It is less dense than Earth and has a diameter about 11 times greater. Its chemical composition is not known.

The researchers suspect that the planet formed further away from its star and then migrated inward.

“Forming large planets close to the star is difficult because the protoplanetary disk dissipates away from closest to the star the fastest, meaning there’s not enough material to form a large planet that close that quickly,” Barber said.

The researchers detected it using what is called the “transit” method, observing a dip in the host star’s brightness when the planet passes in front of it, from the perspective of a viewer on Earth. It was found by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, space telescope.

“This is the youngest-known transiting planet. It is on par with the youngest planets known,” Barber said.

Exoplanets not detected using this method sometimes are directly imaged using telescopes. But these typically are massive ones, around 10 times greater than our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter.

Stars and planets form from clouds of interstellar gas and dust.

“To form a star-planet system, the cloud of gas and dust will collapse and spin into a flat environment, with the star at the center and the disk surrounding it. Planets will form in that disk. The disk will then dissipate starting from the inner region near the star,” Barber said.

“It was previously thought that we wouldn’t be able to find a transiting planet this young because the disk would be in the way. But for some reason that we aren’t sure of, the outer disk is warped, leaving a perfect window to the star and allowing us to detect the transit,” Barber added.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)