Astronomers observe three iron rings in a planet-forming disk

The origin of Earth and the solar system inspires scientists and the public alike. By studying the present state of our home planet and other objects in the solar system, researchers have developed a detailed picture of the conditions when they evolved from a disk made of dust and gas surrounding the infant sun some 4.5 billion years ago.

With the breathtaking progress made in star and planet formation research aiming at far-away celestial objects, we can now investigate the conditions in environments around young stars and compare them to the ones derived for the early solar system. Using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), an international team of researchers led by József Varga from the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, did just that. They observed the planet-forming disk of the young star HD 144432, approximately 500 light-years away.

"When studying the dust distribution in the disk's innermost region, we detected for the first time a complex structure in which dust piles up in three concentric rings in such an environment," says Roy van Boekel. He is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, and a co-author of the underlying research article to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.