Snapshot! HL Tau offers insight into planetary formation

Ever wondered about how the solar system came to be? Of course, there are plenty of existing explanations, but there has never been direct evidence of another planetary system forming in a proto-planetary disk. Well that information drought has quite possibly come to a close. An image taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has triggered a wide channel of discussion because that very image seems to resemble, what astrophysicists at the University of Toronto claim to be, a forming planetary system. That system was catalogued as HL Tau, and it is the first image of its kind to be a candidate for a proto-planetary disk in action. The reason why there is so much debate about the image is because some scientists view the gaps as too close together, meaning that the gravitational force between the bodies would have ejected the planets from the system earlier on. However, the research team led by Daniel Tamayo strongly suggest that this is not the case. They argue that the mechanism responsible for the close gaps is called special resonant configuration. This resonance implies that the planets have "specific orbital periods" because of the gravitational interactions with each other and thus avoid direct collisions. He has also created two videos with the distinct resonant and non-resonant situations, and showed how the resonant system is naturally stable and would be the most likely case. HL Tau is a relatively young system, so it is predicted that over billions of years, the planets in the system will be ejected or take extreme elliptical orbits around the host star. Regardless, HL Tau will yield fascinating clues in aiding us understand whether our solar system is a typical one for hosting life. For more information: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-astrophysicists-proof-famous-image-planets.html