When the Undertones sang about “Teenage Kicks,” they could well have been inadvertently referring to the chaotic and violent “teenage” periods of planetary systems that are shaped by collisions between bodies of various sizes, such as the impact upon Earth by a massive body that created the moon.<\/p>\n
Now, using the world’s largest radio telescope project, the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA<\/a>), astronomers have captured snapshots representing the chaotic “teenage years” of planets forming around infant stars.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The breakthrough, made as part of the Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) survey being conducted by ALMA, could not only help scientists better understand the processes that drive the evolution of planetary systems, but it could also help us better understand a turbulent period of our own solar system<\/a>‘s history that has, until now, been shrouded in mystery.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n “We’ve often seen the ‘baby pictures’ of planets forming, but until now, the \u2018teenage years\u2019 have been a missing link,” team co-leader Meredith Hughes of Wesleyan University, Connecticut, said in a statement<\/a>. “This project gives us a new lens for interpreting the craters on the moon, the dynamics of the Kuiper Belt, and the growth of planets big and small. It\u2019s like adding the missing pages to the Solar System’s family album.”<\/p>\n Teenage kicks<\/p>\n Hughes and colleagues used the 66 radio telescopes located in the Atacama desert region of northern Chile that make up ALMA to observe 24 disks of dusty debris around infant stars, the detritus that remains after planets have formed.<\/p>\n “Debris discs represent the collision-dominated phase of the planet formation process,” ARKS team member Thomas Henning of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) said. “With ALMA, we are able to characterise the disc structures pointing to the presence of planets. In parallel, with direct imaging and radial velocity studies, we are searching for young planets in these systems.”<\/p>\n Evidence of this period of the solar system’s history can be seen in the icy ring of comets beyond the orbit of Neptune<\/a> known as the Kuiper Belt.<\/a> These objects were created through massive collisions and planetary migrations that occurred around the sun billions of years ago, around the same time as Earth’s moon was forming.<\/p>\n