A team of Dutch astronomers, led by Thomas Wijnen (Radboud University), has managed to tilt and shrink gaseous discs, in which planets form, in a virtual wind tunnel. The research helps for example in finding an explanation for the tilted planetary orbits in our own solar system. Wijnen and his colleagues publish their findings in two articles in the journal Astronomyand Astrophysics.

A newborn star is surrounded by a disc of gas and dust out of which planets form. In addition, there is a lot of remaining gas in star forming areas, which was not used to form stars (and their discs). Dutch astronomers presume that the gaseous disc from which our own planet system originated was tilted under the influence of its movement through gas.

To investigate the hypothesis of the tilting gaseous discs, Dutch astronomers placed a star with a gaseous disc in a virtual wind tunnel and tested several different conditions. A real wind tunnel was not an option because that wind tunnel should be larger than a complete solar system and because the processes last for hundreds of thousands of years.

Thomas Wijnen (at the time of the research employed at Radboud University, now working at Leiden University), is the first author of two scientific articles on the tilting and shrinking discs. He explains: "In a video of our simulation you see the disc tilting. You can also see how the outer layers of the dust disc are stripped by the flow. The disc also shrinks because it continuously sweeps up gas from the flow, but that is harder to see in the video."

The researchers are able to describe the shrinking of the discs theoretically and applied their theory by simulating discs in, among others, the Trapezium Cluster, a star-forming region in the Orion Nebula in the constellation of Orion at 'only' 1,300 light-years from Earth.

The Dutch simulations appear to resemble the reality well. Wijnen: "We have discovered that near collisions between two discs are less important than previously thought. Our simulations show that sweeping up gas from the environment is more important. Until now, no one had investigated the influence of the swept up gas and no one had thought that it can play such a big role."

In the future, the researchers would like to investigate the influence of a shrinking disc on the formation of planets. They suggest that due to the shrinking, planets that originate on the outside of the system can move to their star. Research on planet formation is "hot" because in early 2017 the TRAPPIST-1 system was discovered which has seven big planets orbiting close to its star. Since that discovery, scientists, for example Amsterdam astronomers, try to explain how such a system could have formed.

"Changes in Orientation and Shape of Protoplanetary Discs Moving Through an Ambient Medium," T. P. G. Wijnen, F. I. Pelupessy, O. R. Pols, S. Portegies Zwart, 2017 August, Astronomyand Astrophysics.

"Disc Truncation in Embedded Star Clusters: Dynamical Encounters Versus Face-on Accretion," T. P. G. Wijnen, O. R. Pols, F. I. Pelupessy, S. Portegies Zwart, 2017 August, Astronomyand Astrophysics.

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