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Our Earth and the other planets in our solar system were born from a giant disk of dust and gas around our sun. And astronomers have found many such disks in our Milky Way galaxy. They call them circumstellar disks, or protoplanetary disks. It\u2019s in these disks that planets are being born. On November 29, 2023, scientists said that \u2013 for the first time \u2013 they\u2019ve found a circumstellar disk around a massive young star in another galaxy. <\/p>\n
The disk resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way, 160,000 light-years away. <\/p>\n
The discovery shows that such planet-forming disks are likely common around stars in other galaxies besides our own. <\/p>\n
Researchers from the U.K., Germany and the U.S. used the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to make the discovery.<\/p>\n
The research team published their peer-reviewed results in Nature<\/em> on November 29, 2023.<\/p>\n The 2024 lunar calendars are here! Best Christmas gifts in the universe! Check \u2019em out here.<\/p>\n The circumstellar disk is a type of accretion disk). In accretion disks, things are both orbiting a central body \u2013 a sun, or, for example, a black hole \u2013 and small bodies are also accreting, or sticking together, to make larger bodies. Thus planets are born. The disk that ALMA discovered is the first accretion disk ever detected in a galaxy outside of our own Milky Way. As Anna McLeod, lead author at Durham University in the U.K., stated:<\/p>\n When I first saw evidence for a rotating structure in the ALMA data I could not believe that we had detected the first extragalactic accretion disk. It was a special moment. We know disks are vital to forming stars and planets in our galaxy, and here, for the first time, we\u2019re seeing direct evidence for this in another galaxy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n1st extragalactic accretion disk<\/h3>\n
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