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A young star named 49 Ceti has been discovered by the astronomers. The star is surrounded by an astonishing mass of gas which questions about the understanding of the planet formation. It is said to be about 40 million years old and the planet formation theories predict that the gas should have been vanished by that age.

“We found atomic carbon gas in the debris disk around 49 Ceti by using more than 100 hours of observations on the ASTE telescope,” said an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), Aya Higuchi.

ASTE is a telescope which has a diameter of 10-m and is operated by NAOJ in Chile.

Young stars are surrounded by the protoplanetary disks which are gaseous dusky disks which leads to the formation of planets. The aggregation of dust particles form Earth-like planets or becomes giant gaseous planets like Jupiter by collecting large amounts of gas from the disk.

Based on the present theories, with the passing of time, the gas in the disk is either formed into planets or is blown away by the pressure of radiation from the central star.

Astronomers have found that, some amount of gas is still being possessed by several debris disk. A study which has been publishes in the journal Astrophysical Journal letters says that the amount of gas that 49Ceti is surrounded with can be compared with the gas around the younger starts in the active planet formation.

However, there exists no theoretical models in order to explain the amount of gas being persisted for this long. There exists another possibility for the gas being formed by the collision of small bodies like comets.

According to a study, the planet formation models are being reconsidered as prompted by the ALMA results.

By Shrithika Kushangi