Misato Fukagawa

In 2022, the Subaru telescope photographed a point of light 100 astronomical units from the star AB Aurigae. The point was named planet AB Aur b, but debates did not subside: what exactly is glowing, the planet itself or dust around it?

When a giant planet grows, it pulls in gas. Some of that gas swirls around it into a small disk — called a circumplanetary disk. It is in such disks that moons are thought to form. For the planet PDS 70 c, located 370 light-years away, such a disk was directly observed using the ALMA antenna array in the millimeter range.