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Oldest Planet-Forming Disk Amazes Astronomers And Amateur Scientists

By Lorenzo Tanos
Published on: 06:57 PST, Oct 22, 2016

The universe’s oldest planet-forming disk has just been discovered, and it’s mostly thanks to the efforts of a NASA initiative that recruited thousands of citizen scientists to help spot these primordial objects.

The disk, according to a report from UPI, is estimated to be about 45 million-years-old and can be found surrounding a newly-spotted red dwarf in the Carina association. According to University of Oklahoma astronomer Steven Silverberg, who led the team that discovered the disk, most of these objects fade away before they reach the 30-million-year-mark. He added that its being part of the Carina stellar group allows for the estimate of its age, putting at a similar range as the other stars in the association.

As mentioned above, the discovery of the new planet-forming disk was facilitated by amateur science, mainly through NASA’s Disk Detective program. The program, which is led by Goddard Space Flight Center astronomer Marc Kuchner, has recruited about 30,000 citizen scientists since its website launched in January 2014 and has been responsible for the sighting and classification of about two million space objects.

A separate report from Phys.org further describes the resources members of the Disk Detective initiative had used and how they classified celestial objects in their research. According to the report, members viewed ten-second video snippets from NASA surveys such as WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) and 2MASS (Two-Micron All Sky Survey). And in this particular case, Disk Detective citizen scientists collaborated with professional astronomers to find the planet-forming disk, a warm circumstellar disk normally linked to younger solar systems.

“Without the help of the citizen scientists examining these objects and finding the good ones, we might never have spotted this object,” said Kuchner in a statement. “The WISE mission alone found 747 million (warm infrared) objects, of which we expect a few thousand to be circumstellar disks.”

There’s no exact science when it comes to ascertaining the age of stars and planets, and the best researchers can come up with is often a ballpark figure. But for the researchers behind the new discovery, it was fairly easy, as the red dwarf was spotted in the Carina stellar association. In here, the movements of the stars suggests that they were born in around the same part of the universe, and around the same timeframe.

Phys.org adds that in order to determine whether the red dwarf and the associated disk were part of Carina or not, Carnegie Institution for Science astronomer Jonathan Gagne came up with a “test” that eventually determined the beings’ approximate age. Still, he believes more research may be needed to definitely confirm whether the planet-forming disk and the dwarf star it surrounds are really 15 million years older than the average circumstellar disk.

“It is surprising to see a circumstellar disk around a star that may be 45 million years old, because we normally expect these disks to dissipate within a few million years. More observations will be needed to determine whether the star is really as old as we suspect, and if it turns out to be, it will certainly become a benchmark system to understand the lifetime of disks.”

In addition to the age of the disk and its associated star, Phys.org noted that the disk may be a potential host to some exoplanets. Typically, these planets are spotted in disks much like the one in the Carina association, with a lot of the same unusual features. The publication added that the red dwarf is similar in type to Proxima Centauri, best-known as the host of exoplanet Proxima b, and also the star closest to our sun.

The planet-forming disk’s discovery was documented in a study published earlier in the week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Featured Image by Jonathan Holden/Disk Detective]

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