Story highlights The first confirmed image of a newborn planet was captured by a planet-hunting instrument

The planet is still growing, which could shed new light on how planets form

(CNN) A planet-hunting instrument has captured the first confirmed image of a newborn planet that's still forming in our galaxy.

To the right of the black circle at the center of the image, the round bright planet can be seen within the disk of gas and dust around the young dwarf star PDS 70. Of course, the center isn't naturally this dark. Instead, the researchers used a coronagraph to block the bright light of the star in order to look at the disk and the planet.

This is the first clear image of a planet caught in the act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70.

It's carving out a path through the disk around the star, which is in the Centaurus constellation. The protoplanetary disk is the "planet factory" full of gas and dust around young stars. The planet was found in a gap in this disk, which means it is close to where it was born and still growing by accumulating material from the disk.

The planet, dubbed PDS 70b, was detected by an international team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile and its planet-hunting instrument, called SPHERE. The instrument is considered to be one of the most powerful planet hunters in existence.

The discovery by two teams of researchers is detailed in two papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Monday.

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