But even though astronomers knew the giant heavenly body existed, there was no direct evidence of that fact. Scientists could only make inferences about it based on the information they had at their disposal.
Until now. In 2015, Amherst Assistant Professor of Astronomy Kate Follette and a team of colleagues from other institutions were able to image that “baby planet”—called LkCa15b and pronounced “lick calcium 15 b”—in its still-formative state. They are the first group of scientists to ever directly image a planet still in the process of forming, otherwise known as a protoplanet.
“This is at the very hairy edge of what we can do,” Follette said recently, adding that when she first saw the image of LkCa 15 b she found it hard to believe what was in front of her eyes. “It’s a small signal. I talked myself into and out of what I was seeing.”
Follette explained that planets in other solar systems, called exoplanets, behave as Earth does and orbit around stars. (In Earth’s solar system, that star is the sun.) Planets like LkCa15b are hard to see directly, since they are very far away, and the brilliant light emitted by the stars that the exoplanets orbit make it difficult to see anything close to them. As a result, scientists are often forced to use other, indirect ways to detect and study these distant bodies. One common method, for example, involves measuring the dimming of a star as an exoplanet passes between it and the Earth.
In response to a reporter’s “I have to ask it” question of whether or not she believes in the existence of other life forms in the universe, Follette said she couldn’t provide an answer any time soon, because such a response would just be hypothetical.
“Of course, exoplanets were purely speculative until 1995,” she mused. “So who knows what we will find in the future?”