Researchers unravel the mystery of natural selection of planets

Eight or nine planets in our solar system, maybe more? Astronomers have not yet fully resolved the debate that drives teachers crazy. However, what they are sure of is that there were more in the beginning and the gas giant Jupiter had a narrow escape.

But then why do some planets decay into the core of life while others live for billions and billions of years? To find out, a team of CNRS researchers aimed the intrepid James Webb Space Telescope at the “nursery of stars” in the rich Orion Nebula.

More specifically on the nascent planetary system located 1,300 light years from Earth, and which responds to the crude name of “d203-506”.

In a publication that made the front page of an international magazine this Thursday ScienceThey deliver their findings and designate one of the decisive factors governing this “planet Koh-Lanta” to sustain life: these are “giant stars”.

With a fleeting lifetime on the scale of the universe, these stars “ten times more massive than the Sun and 100,000 times more luminous” project their powerful ultraviolet rays onto surrounding planets. “They illuminate the embryos of planetary systems and, in doing so, they select the planets. In particular, they can prevent the formation of certain planets, such as Jupiter, which contain a lot of gas, by scattering their material,” Olivier Berni, Institute for explains the CNRS Research Director in Toulouse of Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (Irap) and co-author of the article.

Jupiter is saved by the soldier Surya

According to experts, in our own solar system, very early, massive stars existed. “They disappeared billions of years ago but we still see traces of them in meteorites,” he says. So they aimed their “laser beams” at planets that are now dust and will never be named.

But Jupiter, which was on the side, benefited from a good “shield”. Favorable or destructive, the effect of massive stars also depends on the “mass of the central star of the planetary system”. In other words, if our Sun wasn’t so big, Jupiter wouldn’t be here. In “d203-506”, which has a weak star, she wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Researchers will now turn to other “nurseries” to refine their results and continue to unravel the mystery of the world’s origins.