A search for accreting young companions

There have even been detections of a few young protoplanet candidates still embedded in the circumstellar disks of their host stars. The exact physics that describes the accretion of material from the circumstellar disk onto the suspected circumplanetary disk and eventually onto the young, forming planet is still an open question.

We seek to detect and quantify observables related to accretion processes occurring locally in circumstellar disks, which could be attributed to young forming planets. We focus on objects known to host protoplanet candidates and/or disk structures thought to be the result of interactions with planets. We analyzed observations of six young stars and their surrounding environments with the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the H{alpha} filter (656nm) and a nearby continuum filter (644.9nm).