Space: Toulouse’s discovery of the role of stars in planetary formation on the front page of prestigious “Science” magazine

How are planets born? At what moment? In what environment? Since September 2022, in Toulouse, Olivier Bern’s team has been probing inside the Orion Nebula. In this star nursery closest to Earth, located 1,350 light-years away, astronomers at the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse are looking for clues to the history of the formation of planetary systems.

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To do this, they rely on the first images provided by the James Webb Space Telescope in September 2022. Thanks to its six-meter diameter mirror and infrared spectrometer capable of piercing the dust veil, IRAP researchers collected the findings. In 2023, they remarkably observed a molecule never before discovered in space, the methyl cation (CH3+), an essential component of organic chemistry.

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This 1^er March 2024, research conducted in Toulouse in collaboration with international teams of the PDRs4All project, is on the front page of a prestigious scientific journal. Science.

The study of “d203-506” reveals the crucial role played by massive stars in the formation of planetary systems. “Behind its name worthy of a Star Wars droid, d203-506 has a lot to teach us. Studying this embryonic planetary system is a way to go back in time,” says Olivier Bernay, CNRS researcher, astrophysicist at IRAP.

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The brightest stars produce a powerful wind that prevents the formation of planets

“Stars do not form alone, they are born in groups and there are all sizes, including massive, very bright stars (10 times more massive than the Sun and 100,000 times more luminous) that form planets, will be illuminated by the entire environment. These massive stars. This is also the case for our solar system: meteorite studies show that in addition to the Sun, there was a giant star that disappeared after a few million years, we talk about the “Tatooine” theory (reference by George Lucas in Star Wars on the imagined planet and which orbits two stars. We want to observe the role of these giant stars in the formation of planetary systems”, continues the scientist.

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The amount of matter that escapes into the cosmos

What the Toulouse team has managed to measure is the precise effect these massive stars have on their neighborhood and therefore on these embryonic planetary systems. “These very bright stars illuminate, heat, and produce winds with ultraviolet radiation that cause the evaporation of surrounding material. Since the late 1990s, Hubble (the predecessor of the NASA Space Telescope, James Webb, editor’s note) has It was known but we had no precise measurements. What’s new is that the James Webb telescope, thanks to infrared technology, makes it possible to quantify: the nucleus of the planetary system d203-506 loses the equivalent of a mass once Earth every year in the universe. A lot of matter is being ejected, which means that it will be difficult to form planets in this atmosphere. Thanks to the NIRCAM instrument, we can see the envelope of matter escaping from the womb of these planets”, explains Olivier Bernay.

The extraordinary details revealed by the James Webb Telescope have been translated into an image, which makes the front page today Science. It is a coloring work carried out by Salome Fuenmayer, a Venezuelan-born graphic designer based in Toulouse. “When I met her, she was my kids’ babysitter. She was the only graphic designer I knew, so I recruited her to colorize our data and transform it into these fabulous images that are so popular. Dream people.” , says the astrophysicist.

“The Quest to Reconstruct Our History”

This astronomical discovery should shed further light on the origin of the planetary systems. “The story we’re telling is that another component is added to the planet formation equation. The mass and gravity of the star at the center of the formation system will have an influence. In our system, if there’s a Jupiter, it’s probably especially because, with its fairly high gravity, the Sun was able to retain the gas released by a massive star. We will never observe the same material at the time of our solar system’s formation, but we can measure certain processes to reconstruct our history”, concludes Olivier Bernay.