NEW YORK, March 26 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists are watching what appears to be the creation of a new planet near a distant star.
Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, said he and his colleagues used a coronograph attached to a U.S. Air Force telescope in Hawaii to construct an image of material that appears to be a gas-and-dust cloud coalescing into a solid body form orbiting the star AB Aurigae, the National Science Foundation said Tuesday in a news release.
The report, which will be published in the Astrophysical Journal sometime this year, said the image shows a horseshoe-shaped void in the disc with a bright point appearing as a dot in the void.
"The deficit of material could be due to a planet forming and sucking material onto it, coalescing into a small point in the image and clearing material in the immediate surroundings," Oppenheimer said. "It seems to be indicative of the formation of a small body, either a planet or a brown dwarf."
