Science is Fun Fridays!

 

I came across this MIT class called "Making Art for Scientists."

Marcelo Barrazza is a postdoc in astronomy, and he wanted to develop a way to represent the process by which planets and planetary systems are born.

Here we see a visualization of the protoplanetary disk.

Link

A recent observation of these disks led to a carbon monoxide finding - for years astronomers have noted that more should be visible in the formation of planets.  They've now discovered there is, trapped in ice formation around the disks.

The team used a model designed to study clouds on exoplanets.

"Carbon monoxide is essentially used to trace everything we know about disks - like mass, composition, and temperature.  This could mean many of our results for disks have been biased and uncertain because we don't understand the compound well enough," says lead author, Diana Powell, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

Link