Birth of Planets in Orion Nebula

These NASA/Hubble images are thought to be planetary proplyds, or the beginnings of planets surrounding stars in the Orion nebula. Their press release says, 

"The brighter discs are indicated by a glowing cusp in the excited material and facing the bright star, but which we see at a random orientation within the nebula, so some appear edge on, and others face on, for instance. Other interesting features enhance the look of these captivating objects, such as emerging jets of matter and shock waves."

You can tell that many of these objects appear to be toruses surrounding stars. One image in particular resembles a developing zygote--look at the fourth row down and the fourth image in from the left. You can clearly see the opening at the top of the torus and can easily imagine the toroidal funnel going down to the center and out the bottom.

Now compare the image above to this image of a developing mouse embryo. It appears that a similar dynamic mechanism is involved in both cases.

In 2018 I posted this article on the torus of a newly forming planet, which you can access here.

Then again in 2020 I posted an article noting the similarities between a newly fertilized egg and swirling patterns of massive systems.

MIT researchers were surprised to discover that the swirling patterns precisely mirror other systems, from atmospheric hurricanes to ocean circulation hydrodynamics to quantum fluids. 

As you can see, the swirling patterns emanate from a central interior position and spread over the surface of the egg. You can also see the depression on the far side of the egg begin to appear as it prepares to sink inward toward the middle, where it will eventually form the hollow tube of the organism's gut.

I predict that when NASA/Hubble is able to photograph the planetary proplyds as motion pictures, we will see the same exact swirling patterns found in embryos and hurricanes.

As above, so below.

First confirmed image of the birth of a planet--arising from a torus!

In the article below, scientists refer to the torus around the baby planet's home star as a "proto-planetary disk."  You will recognize the familiar pattern as what the Simple Explanation calls a "proto-torus." 

This is the first clear image of a planet caught in the act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70.

It's always fun for me to see scientists run across new toroidal patterns, as each instance confirms my hypothesis that the basic material in our universe arises out of toroidal energetic patterns aggregating into material form. In this case, the energetic material is likely growing out of the center of the proto-disk and aggregating into this new planet rather than the other way around--it is not merely matter trapped by the sun.

Here is a reprint of the July 2, 2018 CNN article by Ashley Strickland, announcing the new planet:

A planet-hunting instrument has captured the first confirmed image of a newborn planet that's still forming in our galaxy.

To the right of the black circle at the center of the image, the round bright planet can be seen within the disk of gas and dust around the young dwarf star PDS 70. Of course, the center isn't naturally this dark. Instead, the researchers used a coronagraph to block the bright light of the star in order to look at the disk and the planet.

It's carving out a path through the disk around the star, which is in the Centaurus constellation. The protoplanetary disk is the "planet factory" full of gas and dust around young stars. The planet was found in a gap in this disk, which means it is close to where it was born and still growing by accumulating material from the disk.

The planet, dubbed PDS 70b, was detected by an international team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and its planet-hunting instrument, called SPHERE. The instrument is considered to be one of the most powerful planet hunters in existence.

The discovery by two teams of researchers is detailed in two papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Monday.

"These discs around young stars are the birthplaces of planets, but so far only a handful of observations have detected hints of baby planets in them," Miriam Keppler of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, who led one team, said in a statement. "The problem is that until now, most of these planet candidates could just have been features in the disc."

André Müller, also with the Max Planck institute and leader of the second team, said in a statement that "Keppler's results give us a new window onto the complex and poorly-understood early stages of planetary evolution. We needed to observe a planet in a young star's disc to really understand the processes behind planet formation."

SPHERE was able to measure the planet's brightness at different wavelengths, which enabled the researchers to determine the properties of its atmosphere.

This is incredibly challenging, because even though SPHERE used the coronagraph to block the star, it had to seek out the planet's signal in multiple ways.

Researchers were able to determine that it's a giant gas planet and has a blisteringly hot surface temperature of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit. This is at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, the largest gas giant in our solar system, and well above the highest temperature recorded on any planet in our solar system.

They also deduced that it has a cloudy atmosphere.

Although the planet looks close to its star in the image, it's 1,864,113,576 miles away. That's the same distance as Uranus from our sun. It takes the planet 120 years to orbit the star, which fits with astronomers' predictions that gas giants would need to form quite far from their stars.

Directly imaging the planet is a game-changer. Going forward, researchers will be able test models of how planets form and learn more about the history of how the earliest planetary systems formed, like our own solar system.

"After more than a decade of enormous efforts to build this high-tech machine, now SPHERE enables us to reap the harvest with the discovery of baby planets!" Thomas Henning, director at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and leader of the teams, said in a statement.

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Proto-torus shape. Energy from the middle; containment from the boundary. Chalk drawing by Cyd Ropp.