Ruobing Dong, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Zhaohuan Zhu, of Princeton Univ., came to the conclusion by computer modeling how gas-and-dust disks evolve around newborn stars.
According to NASA, gaps and rings present in circumstellar disks suggest the presence of planets. However, the gaps, which are believed to be swept clean by a planet’s gravity, don’t provide the location of the planet. Further, multiple planets may occupy a single gap, making it difficult to estimate the number of planetary bodies and their respective masses.
However, spiral disks formed in a planet’s wake may not just help astronomers detect planets, they may also provide information regarding the planet’s size.
