What can the protoplanetary disk’s lifetime teach us about finding life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the lifetime of a young protoplanetary disk to determine its formation and evolutionary characteristics. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand how our own solar system formed and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.
"In a sense, protoplanetary disks provide us with baby pictures of planetary systems, including a glimpse of what our solar system may have looked like in its infancy," said Dr. Feng Long, who is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Sagan Fellow with the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the study.
For the study, the researchers used NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the inner disk of the protoplanetary system WISE J044634.16–262756.1B (aka J0446B), which orbits an M-type star (the smallest type of star) and is estimated to be approximately 34 million years old. For context, our solar system is approximately 4.6 billion years old and M-type stars are hypothesized to have lifespans of trillions of years, well longer than the current age of the universe at 14.7 billion years old.
Artist’s illustration of a protoplanetary disk orbiting a star smaller than our Sun. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)
Disks this age have long been hypothesized and designated as debris disks due to the large number of asteroids and rocks smashing into each other. However, the team found that the J0446B disk contains several hydrocarbons and gases, including 14 molecular species, along with argon and neon, indicating this disk was still in its primordial phase and hasn’t reached the debris disk phase of its evolution.
"Developing a better understanding of how low-mass star systems evolve and getting snapshots of long-lived disks might help pave the way to filling out the blanks in the photo album of the universe," said Dr. Long.
What new discoveries about protoplanetary disks will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: The Astrophysical Journal Letters, EurekAlert!, Wikipedia, University of Arizona
