HR 4796A: A Recipe for Planets
Two hundred and twenty light years from Earth, planets are forming.
Recent observations of the
binary star system HR 4796 have shown that one of the stars is surrounded by a
dusty gaseous disk.
This disk is of the right size, age, and density for
dust pellets to accrete surrounding matter.
A hole in the disk's center indicates that
increasingly larger condensates are colliding and sticking together,
coalescing into
moons and planets.
Pictured above is a false-color image of the system, with the bright star HR 4796A indicated by a cross. The disk measures
about five times the size of
our Solar System, and is seen nearly edge-on.
HR 4796 is in the
southern constellation Centaurus.