Sleeve length is approximately 10 million kilometers.
The researchers hope to find an explanation for how planets are born away from the parent stars.
Scientists first discovered spiral arms in the protoplanetary disk around a young star. According to researchers, the discovery will help explain how large planets are born away from the parent stars. The findings of scientists was published in the journal Science.
In the study, the astronomers watched the star Elias 2-27, which is located at a distance of 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. According to the researchers, the star formed only a million years ago. For comparison, the age of the Sun is about 4.6 billion years. Previously, scientists had known that around Elias 2-27 is the protoplanetary disk, but they believed that this axisymmetric disk without any pronounced internal structure.
New research revealed in the protoplanetary disk sleeves that resemble spiral arms of the milky Way. Sleeves extend for a distance of more than 10 million kilometers, twice the distance from Pluto to the Sun.
Such a structure astrophysics observed for the first time. Previously, they were able to see the spiral formation in protoplanetary disks, however, at the stage when around the star was actively formed planet that could create them. Here the authors failed to detect signs of the existence of large planets. Scientists noticed in the disk only a narrow strip where the dust density was much lower, but its size is typical for a large celestial body.
The researchers suggest that the spiral structure could appear as a result of gravitational instability of the disk. Such a scenario has been proposed by astrophysicists based on the evaluation of the mass and shape of the protoplanetary disk, and also because of the symmetry of the sleeves.
