An international team of astronomers, led by University of Galway, has discovered the likely site of a new planet in formation.
It is most likely a giant gas planet up to a few times the mass of Jupiter.
Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile, the researchers captured images around a distant young star for the first time in the form of scattered near-infrared light that revealed an exceptionally structured disk.
The study was led by Dr Christian Ginski from the Centre for Astronomy in the School of Natural Sciences at University of Galway and was co-authored by four postgraduate students at the university.
The disk extends out to 130 astronomical units from its parent star - the equivalent to 130 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. It shows a bright ring followed by a gap centered at roughly 50 astronomical units.
For comparison, the outermost planet in our solar system, Neptune, has an orbital distance from the Sun of 30 astronomical units.
Inside the disk gap, reminiscent of the outskirts of a hurricane on Earth, a system of spiral arms are visible.
While appearing tiny in the image, the inner part of the planet-forming system measures 40 astronomical units in radius and would swallow all of the planets in our own solar system.
Dr Ginski said: "While our team has now observed close to 100 possible planet-forming disks around nearby stars, this image is something special.
"One rarely finds a system with both rings and spiral arms in a configuration that almost perfectly fits the predictions of how a forming planet is supposed to shape its parent disk according to theoretical models.
"Detections like this bring us one step closer to understand how planets form in general and how our solar system might have formed in the distant past."
Based on their research findings, Dr Ginski and his team have secured time at the world leading James Webb Space Telescope observatory in the upcoming observation cycle.
Using the sensitivity of the James Webb Telescope, the team hopes to be able to take an actual image of the young planet. If planets in the disk are confirmed, it will become a prime laboratory for the study of planet-disk interaction.
The wider research team included astronomers in the UK, Germany, Australia, USA, Netherlands, Italy, Chile, France and Japan.
The study has been published in the international journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
