Astronomy & Astrophysics

• The very first step in finding out is to understand how special the Earth really is – and, by extension, our entire Solar System.
• And that’s exactly what my colleagues and I have started to uncover with a new series of studies of star-forming regions.
• In the past decades, astronomers have spotted more than 5,000 planets around distant stars – so called exoplanets.
• We now know that planets are so abundant that you can look up to almost any star in the night sky and be near certain that planets are circling around it.
• This is no mean feat of engineering, with the latest generation of instruments only being available since about a decade.

New findings

• Our team, consisting of scientists from more than ten countries was able to observe more than 80 of these young stars in amazing detail – with our findings published in a series of papers in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
• All the images were taken in near infrared light, invisible to the human eye.
• They show the light from the distant young stars as it is reflected from the tiny dust particles in the discs.

• Unlike the Sun, most stars in our galaxy have companions, with two or more stars orbiting a shared centre of mass.
• When looking at the constellation of Orion, we found that stars in groups of two or more were less likely to have large planet-forming discs than lone stars.
• Another interesting finding was how uneven the discs in this region were, suggesting they may host massive planets that warp the discs.

Christian Ginski works for the University of Galway and frequently works with ESO facilities.