First confirmed image of the birth of a planet

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It's carving out a path through the disk around the star, which is in the Centaurus constellation. The protoplanetary disk is the "planet factory" full of gas and dust around young stars. The planet was found in a gap in this disk, which means it is close to where it was born and still growing by accumulating material from the disk. The planet, dubbed PDS 70b, was detected by an international team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and its planet-hunting instrument, called SPHERE. The instrument is considered to be one of the most powerful planet hunters in existence.

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Researchers were able to determine that it's a giant gas planet and has a blisteringly hot surface temperature of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. This is at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, the largest gas giant in our solar system, and well above the highest temperature recorded on any planet in our solar system. They also deduced that it has a cloudy atmosphere. Although the planet looks close to its star in the image, it's 1,864,113,576 miles away. That's the same distance as Uranus from our sun. It takes the planet 120 years to orbit the star, which fits with astronomers' predictions that gas giants would need to form quite far from their stars.

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