I Scientific Highlights 045

Direct imaging surveys are powerful tools to search for Jupiter-mass planets around young stars, and those searchers are useful to study the theory of the formation of giant planets with wide orbits around their parent stars. Recent direct imaging surveys show that the projected separation of young planetary-mass companions (PMCs) are surprisingly wide compared with the orbital separations of planets in our solar system, extra-solar planets detected by indirect methods, and predictions of the standard core accretion model [1]. These results may suggest a diversity in the formation and evolution of PMCs. (e.g., [2]). We present the results of the direct imaging of a PMC candidate around a binary T Tauri star, SR12AB (K4–M2.5), in the ρ Oph star-forming region [3]. Th