A new study on the gas giant PDS 70b has been featured on the NOVA site of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Recently, astronomers acquired a direct image of PDS 70b, which was the first such image of a newly forming planet. Scientists have now gathered further details about the gas giant, including estimates of the rate at which it’s growing.

To read the feature from NOVA, visit: https://aasnova.org/2018/08/17/planet-formation-caught-in-the-act/

The study, “Magellan Adaptive Optics Imaging of PDS 70: Measuring the Mass Accretion Rate of a Young Giant Planet within a Gapped Disk,” was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The work was supported by the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS). NExSS is a NASA research coordination network supported in part by the NASA Astrobiology Program. This program element is shared between NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD) and the Astrophysics Division.

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