Image of 'once in a millennium' space object released

While tracking a star in the constellation of Cygnus, scientists were 'dazzled' by a sudden increase in light of up to 20 times due to the appearance of unique objects.

According to Sci-News , an international team of scientists was monitoring a star named V960 Mon in the constellation of the Unicorn , 5,000 light years from Earth, when they encountered the "blinding" event mentioned above in 2014.

Convinced they had caught something strange, they enlisted the power of the world's leading observatories to continue monitoring the object for years in an attempt to find answers.

The bizarre, chaotic thing that the two observatories observed was planets in the moment of birth - (Photo: ESO/ALMA).

Using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope , they discovered a mysterious collection of complex spiral arms around V960 Mon , extending over distances greater than the diameter of the Solar System.

Calling for help from ALMA , the world's most powerful radio telescope array located in Chile's Atacama Desert, they found that these spiral arms were in the process of fragmentation, leading to the formation of strange masses.

There is only one answer that fits all the data. And it is a "once in a lifetime" moment in astronomical observation.

"This discovery is really exciting because it marks the first detection of clumps around a young star that are capable of forming giant planets ," said Associate Professor Alice Zurlo from Diego Portales University (Chile).

It is also the first observation of gravitational instability at the planetary scale, says lead author Philipp Weber, also from Diego Portales University.

That means the object astronomers are seeing is a protoplanet at the very moment of its birth: The material around the young star will eventually collapse and collapse, and from there, a planet will gradually accrete.

"The size of these still-converging looming clumps suggests that future planets must be as large as Jupiter - the largest planet in the Solar System," said the article published in the scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters .