Cosmic 'hamburger' gives scientists a rare view of a newborn solar system
It could help us learn more about how stars and planets form
By Sarah Fecht Yesterday at 2:00pm
A new image of a developing solar system is helping scientists to learn more about how stars and planets form. This is an illustration of the system, named HH212.
Astronomers theorize that stars and their planets are born when a spinning disk of gas and dust collapses in on itself. But these disks have been hard to detect, because they're relatively small.
Now, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile is making it possible to find and study these disks in detail. In a paper in Science Advances, scientists have published one of the first snapshots of a young protostellar disk named HH212—and it turns out it looks like a hamburger.
http://www.popsci.com/hamburger-in-space
