Monisha Ravisetti is Space.com's Astronomy Editor. She covers black holes, star explosions, gravitational waves, exoplanet discoveries and other enigmas hidden across the fabric of space and time. Previously, she was a science writer at CNET, and before that, reported for The Academic Times.
It could be argued that one of the most perplexing aspects of our solar system is the fact that not every planet is a nice, solid rock like Earth. Some are literally, almost entirely, made of gas.
Though Bajaj and fellow researchers didn't come up with a final, tightly confirmed answer as to how long gas planets may have to form before protoplanetary disk gas depletes fully, he did offer a ballpark based on his calculations."Considering the gas mass in this disk and assuming that the gas will keep leaving at this constant rate that we find — about one moon mass every year — it will take approximately 100,000 years," he estimates.
"These gaps are thought to be created by planets as they consume all material in their way while they go around the star," Bajaj said. is old enough that those nascent worlds had time to eat away some of the disk itself."We also call this the transition stage," Bajaj said."It is transitioning from a protoplanetary disk to a more solar-system-like structure.
Second, ionization happens differently for different elements. Sometimes, there needs to be a really high temperature involved to kick an electron off an atom; other times, the electrons exit more willingly and do so at lower temperatures. "When we saw the spectrum for the first time — my first week of grad school — we saw that both the neon lines were booming!" Bajaj remarked, adding that one of those lines had actually never been seen before around T Cha."We figured out that neon is coming from further away from the star by looking at it with JWST."
At the risk of oversimplification, photoevaporation in this case refers to energy from a star heating up gas in the disk around it, which then forces that gas to disperse into space."Much like how water gets evaporated on Earth," Bajaj said.
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