Unruly Planet Formation in System with Two Suns

14 July, 2014 / Read time: 1 minute

While surveying a series of binary stars with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers uncovered a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming disks around the young binary star HK Tau.

These results provide the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary disks around a double-star and could reveal important details about the birth and eventual orbit of planets in a multi-star system.

Credit: Brian Kent, Bill Saxton, Jeff Hellerman (NRAO/AUI/NSF); NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC); NASA/ESA Hubble Karl Stapelfeldt (JPL) et al.
Music: Mark Mercury