Tag Archive for 'V960 Mon'

This image shows a possible substellar companion orbiting the young star V960 Mon. The candidate object was found with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), using its new Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS). The new ERIS data are shown here in orange, overlaid on older images of the dusty disk as seen with the VLT’s SPHERE instrument (yellow) and ALMA (blue). Image credit: ESO / A. Dasgupta / ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Weber et al.

VLT Spots Protoplanet and Substellar Object Candidates around Young Stars

Jul 22, 2025 by News Staff

Using the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), two teams of astronomers have detected a...

This composite image shows V960 Mon, a young star located over 5,000 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros. Observations obtained using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT, represented in yellow in this image, show that the dusty material orbiting V960 Mon is assembling together in a series of intricate spiral arms extending to distances greater than the entire Solar System. Meanwhile, the blue regions represent data obtained with ALMA. The ALMA data peers deeper into the structure of the spiral arms, revealing large dusty clumps that could contract and collapse to form giant planets roughly the size of Jupiter via a process known as gravitational instability. Image credit: ESO / ALMA / NAOJ / NRAO / Weber et al.

Astronomers See Signs of Planet Formation around V960 Mon

Jul 26, 2023 by News Staff

The formation of giant planets has traditionally been divided into two pathways: core accretion and gravitational instability. However, in recent years,...