Artist’s animation of the PDS70 system

This artist’s animation zooms out from a close-up view on PDS 70c — a young Jupiter-like, gas giant nearly 400 light-years away. While moving away from PDS 70c, we first encounter the moon-forming disc surrounding the planet, with a white point signaling the location where a moon could be forming.

As we move further, the orange dwarf star at the centre of the system comes into view, as does PDS 70b, another planet found in this system. We also see a large ring, a remnant of the circumstellar disc from which the two planets have formed.

At the end of the video, we see the real astronomical image of the system, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).