Chilean Observatory will help to reveal mysteries of planetary formation

Toronto ( Canada), 17 feb ( EFE).-two new observatories, one of them located in the Atacama desert ( Chile), will help to reveal mysteries stellar as the processes of formation of planets in the milky way, said scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the advancement of science in Vancouver today.

Both the Observatory Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Observatory Karl g. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), this last located in United States, are being terminated but scientists attending the AAAS meeting said today that they have already begun to deliver results.

David Wilner, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Centre, pointed out that the two observatories will allow test theories that exist today on the formation of planets.

“These new eyes allow us study the movement of gas and dust disks around young stars at unprecedented scales, and implement test theories on the formation of planets”, said Wilner through a press release.

“Power of soul and the expanded VLA allows study many more stars and solar systems, probably thousands, of what we could before.” “We will help to understand the processes that produce the enormous diversity that we see in the extrasolar planetary systems,” added Wilner.

The scientists noted that the observatories can also unlock closest secrets, as the origin of the oceans. The dominant theory today is that most of the water of the oceans came to Earth in comets that crashed against our planet.

Data collected by soul in the dust disk surrounding TW Hydare, a young star located 170 light years from Earth, have discovered deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, in warm regions close to the star.

The importance of this discovery is that the ocean water contains a high percentage of deuterium. Until now scientists thought that deuterium is only created in cold regions of the disk.

“With more studies like this will be on its way to more accurately measure the percentage of water in the oceans of the Earth which could come from comets,” Wilner said. EFE