Today an international team of astronomers announced a major step forward
in the quest to find planets in orbit around distant stars: possibly
the first image of a planet caught in the act of formation.

Modern scientific ideas describing the way planets are expected to form 
can be traced to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who proposed that they grow
within a vast spinning pancake of dust which is the a messy remnant leftover
from the formation of the sun or star at the middle. 
Following a sort of snowball runaway effect, orbiting debris in the disk is 
expected to clump up into ever larger pieces until one becomes massive enough 
to draw in all the matter from the vicinity of its orbit. At this point, the 
fledgeling planet will have cleared a gap or ring in the disk.

Although a number of such gaps have been found by Astronomers, Kant's beautiful
theory linking them to planets has remained in the realm of unproved phenomena, 
until now. This first planetary babysnap published by the team have caught a 
tiny fleck of light, betraying the presence of a massive body like a planet or 
possibly a brown dwarf, orbiting exactly on queue within the vacant gap in the
disk surrounding the star T Chamaeleontis.

"For understanding planetary formation, this marks a major milestone." said 
Nuria Huélamo of Spain's Centro de Astrobiología, first author of the work to
be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"This could be the first time we have been able to witness a companion digging 
a gap inside its protoplanetary disc”.

"In addition to the exciting science, this result also represents a technical 
tour-de-force" adds Prof Peter Tuthill of the University of Sydney which designed
the instrument which recovered the images. "You have got to work very hard to see
that faint mote of light against the overwhelming glare when the telescope is
staring almost directly at a bright star like T Chamaeleontis."
The quest to image planetary newborns has been one of the most sought-after
goals in modern astronomy, and needed the power of the giant telescopes at
the European Southern Observatory's Paranal observatory in Northern Chile.

The significance of this finding may extend well beyond the confirmation of
theories of planetary birth.  "As with biology, studying newborns teaches us 
a lot" says Dr Michael Ireland also on the Sydney team, "We get to see their
initial properties before they get scrambled up and influenced by their
environment. However there is a practical reason too: a young planet is
basically a searing ball of hot lava, and glows quite brightly making it
much easier to detect compared to mature cool planets like those in our 
solar system."

Summing up the significance of the work, team member Dr Sylvestre Lacour of
Paris Observatory said "This result has opened a whole new window on our universe, 
let's just hope that through it we get to see many more newborn planets twinkling 
in the gaps they have sculpted."