NASA’s Hubble telescope spots Jupiter-like planet forming in ‘unconventional’ way

This is an artist's illustration of a massive, newly forming exoplanet called AB Aurigae b (Credit: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made a new discovery — directly photographing evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through what researchers describe as an "unconventional" and "intense and violent process." According to the space agency, this discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form — a process called "disk instability." "In this method, instead of having a planet that grows and builds up from a small core accumulating matter and gas, the protoplanetary disk around a star cools, and gravity causes it to break up into one or more planet-mass fragments," NASA wrote in a press release Monday.

The newly forming planet, called AB Aurigae b, is probably about nine times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its host star at a distance of 8.6 billion miles – over two times farther than Pluto is from the Sun, according to NASA.

NASA announced an extraordinary new benchmark: the detection of the farthest individual star to date. (Credit: NASA)The agency says at that distance it would take a very long time, if ever, for a Jupiter-sized planet to form by another method called core accretion, leading its researchers to conclude that disk instability has enabled the planet to form at such a large distance."Nature is clever; it can produce planets in a range of different ways," offered Thayne Currie, a lead researcher on the study.This new discovery combined data from two Hubble instruments: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph."Interpreting this system is extremely challenging," Currie.