A Moon’s Birth May Have Been Seen for the First Time

Where did the moon come from? How was it made? How long ago? And what did it look like? For the first time, we might have an idea. Here’s more from SlashGear:

“Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which satellites could be forming,” Myriam Benisty, lead author of the new study and a researcher at the University of Grenoble, France, and at the University of Chile, said of the findings. “Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disc is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time.”

The disc has roughly the same diameter as the distance from our Sun to the Earth. It comprises sufficient mass, meanwhile, to make three satellites the size of our own Moon. PDS 70c is adjacent to PDS 70b, another exoplanet first spotted in 2018. Earlier this year, Hubble was able to track PDS 70b as it feasted on gas and dust to build its own mass.

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