中文翻譯:
在遙遠的宇宙中，有一片亮亮的圓圈，那是Young Planet（年輕的行星），它在一個叫做Very Large Telescope（非常大望遠鏡）的地方拍到的影像。這幅圖片看起來就像我們太陽系在大約45億年前誕生時的樣子。雖然我們無法直接看到地球是怎麼形成的，但透過望遠鏡，我們可以觀察到其他星星周圍正在發生的類似過程。在這幅圖的中央，有一顆年輕的像太陽一樣的星星，它被一個叫做coronagraph的裝置擋住了明亮的光芒。圍繞著這顆星星的是一個明亮、充滿塵埃的原行星盤，這是行星形成的原材料。可以看到一些空隙和圓形的環，那是因為一個新生的世界正在吸引氣體和塵埃，不斷地清理出它的軌道。雖然天文學家之前也觀察過圍繞著星盤的行星，但這是第一次看到一顆外星行星正在原行星盤中主動地開創空隙，這是行星雕刻過程的第一次直接觀察。
原文:
That yellow spot — what is it? It’s a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System’s birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can’t look into the past and see Earth’s formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk — the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric rings mark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk — the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
來源:NASA每日圖片
