The planets in the solar system rotate in planes that are no more than seven degrees deflected from the equator of the sun.
Using the observations of the array of ALMA radio telescopes in Chile, researchers first discovered a curved disk around a young protostar, formed only a few tens of thousands of years ago. This implies that the displacement of planetary orbits in many planetary systems, including ours, may be caused by distortions in the emerging protoplanetary disk at the dawn of their existence.
The planets in the solar system rotate in planes that are no more than seven degrees deflected from the equator of the sun. It has been established that many extrasolar systems contain exoplanets that are also not lying in the same plane. One explanation for this is that some of them could have been affected by collisions with other objects in the system, while others could be affected by the gravitational interaction of stars passing by the system and displacing planets from the original orbital plane.
However, the possibility remained that the formation of worlds outside the “normal” plane may actually be caused by the curvature of the star-forming cloud from which they were born. And so, fresh images of protoplanetary disks actually showed such a curvature, but so far it was not clear how early it was.
A research team from the Institute of Physico-Chemical Research and Chiba University (Japan), led by Nami Sakai, discovered that L1527 (an infant protostar still inside the cloud) has a disk consisting of two parts rotating in different planes. The young luminary is at a distance of 450 light years from the Sun in the Cloud of Taurus, and its disk is still growing.
Observation shows that the displacement of planetary orbits can be caused by structural deformation of the system at the earliest stages of the formation of its worlds. Astronomers will have to explore more infant systems to determine how common such a phenomenon is.
The question remains, what caused the disc skew. The authors of the study offer two reasonable explanations:
- the uneven flow of gas and dust in the protostellar cloud persists for a long time and ultimately manifests itself in the curvature of the disk
- the magnetic field of the protostar is in a plane different from the plane of rotation of the disk, and the inner part of the disk is shifted to the plane of the magnetic field
Japanese scientists will continue to work to determine which process is responsible for the early deformation of the protoplanetary disk.
Forming star and twisted protoplanetary disk
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