It's all about celestial mechanics.
That angle suggests the two bunches of material are located at two Lagrange points. When two celestial bodies are gravitationally bound, such as a star and a planet, there are five points in space where their gravity and orbital motion essentially cancel each other out. At these Lagrange points, which are named L1 through L5, material stays put, essentially frozen in space.
"We're seeing that this material is not just floating around freely, it's stable and has a preference where it wants to be located based on physics and the objects involved," said Long. Current astronomy technology prohibits Long from confirming her hypothesis, but she suspects that further observations of LkCa 15 from ALMA could provide additional evidence to support it. Until then, Long hopes that others will use her technique of looking for debris at Lagrange points in order to find more potential protoplanets."I do hope this method can be widely adopted in the future," she says.
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