{"id":218738,"date":"2025-07-25T20:06:59","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T01:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/astronomers-capture-giant-planet-forming-440-light-years-from-earth"},"modified":"2025-07-25T20:06:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T01:06:59","slug":"astronomers-capture-giant-planet-forming-440-light-years-from-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/astronomers-capture-giant-planet-forming-440-light-years-from-earth","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers capture giant planet forming 440 light-years from Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zYG4H6XnK9Y?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers may have caught a still-forming planet in action, carving out an intricate pattern in the gas and dust that surrounds its young host star. Using ESO\u2019s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they observed a planetary disc with prominent spiral arms, finding clear signs of a planet nestled in its inner regions. This is the first time astronomers have detected a planet candidate embedded inside a disc spiral.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,\u201d says Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, and lead author of this study, published on July 21 in <em>Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers may have caught a still-forming planet in action, carving out an intricate pattern in the gas and dust that surrounds its young host star. Using ESO\u2019s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they observed a planetary disc with prominent spiral arms, finding clear signs of a planet nestled in its inner regions. This is the first [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}