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Benin Displays 26 Antiquities Recovered from France for First Time

French President Emmanuel Macron (L) looks at the doors of Benin King Glele's palace exhibited at the Quai Branly museum before being shipped to the West African country, in Paris, France, Oct. 27, 2021. (AFP Photo)
French President Emmanuel Macron (L) looks at the doors of Benin King Glele's palace exhibited at the Quai Branly museum before being shipped to the West African country, in Paris, France, Oct. 27, 2021. (AFP Photo)
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Benin Displays 26 Antiquities Recovered from France for First Time

French President Emmanuel Macron (L) looks at the doors of Benin King Glele's palace exhibited at the Quai Branly museum before being shipped to the West African country, in Paris, France, Oct. 27, 2021. (AFP Photo)
French President Emmanuel Macron (L) looks at the doors of Benin King Glele's palace exhibited at the Quai Branly museum before being shipped to the West African country, in Paris, France, Oct. 27, 2021. (AFP Photo)

Benin President Patrice Talon on Saturday ‘proudly’ inaugurated a valuable historic exhibition about Cotonou. The exhibition displays 26 royal treasures to the public after they were returned by France in November, nearly 129 years after they were looted, according to Agence France Press (AFP).

This exhibition represents "pride and faith in what we once were, in what we are and in what we will be. This is the true Benin,” Talon told reporters.

He added that the recovery of these pieces “has broken a taboo. It’s not important anymore to wonder whether we can make it or not, because we did,” noting that Benin will request France to return more antiquities stolen by its colonial troops.

The exhibition, which kicked off on Feb.20 and runs until May 22, extends over a 2,000-square-metre space in the presidential palace in Cotonou under the theme “Benin Art Yesterday and Today.”

The 26 pieces returned by France after two years of negotiations between Paris and Cotonou, are the first of its kind recovery of important historic antiquities to an African state.

Earlier on Saturday, President Patrice Talon accompanied French minister of culture Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, who was visiting Cotonou, to see the 26 pieces that were formerly exhibited at the Quai Branly Museum in France.

“It’s a wonderful exhibition that adds more value to the creativity, and political, historic, and aesthetic heritage of these 26 pieces,” she said.

The pieces were stolen in 1892 by French colonial forces from Abomey, capital of the former Dahomey kingdom located in the south of modern-day Benin.

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Fast-forming Alien Planet has Astronomers Intrigued

An artist's depiction of a planet and its host star with a misaligned disk of material, and a binary companion in the background, is shown in this undated handout image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC)/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's depiction of a planet and its host star with a misaligned disk of material, and a binary companion in the background, is shown in this undated handout image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC)/Handout via REUTERS
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Fast-forming Alien Planet has Astronomers Intrigued

An artist's depiction of a planet and its host star with a misaligned disk of material, and a binary companion in the background, is shown in this undated handout image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC)/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's depiction of a planet and its host star with a misaligned disk of material, and a binary companion in the background, is shown in this undated handout image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt, K. Miller (Caltech/IPAC)/Handout via REUTERS

Astronomers have spotted orbiting around a young star a newborn planet that took only 3 million years to form - quite swift in cosmic terms - in a discovery that challenges the current understanding of the speed of planetary formation.
This infant world, estimated at around 10 to 20 times the mass of Earth, is one of the youngest planets beyond our solar system - called exoplanets - ever discovered. It resides alongside the remnants of the disk of dense gas and dust circling the host star - called a protoplanetary disk - that provided the ingredients for the planet to form.
The star it orbits is expected to become a stellar type called an orange dwarf, less hot and less massive than our sun. The star's mass is about 70% that of the sun and it is about half as luminous. It is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 520 light-years from Earth, Reuters reported. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
"This discovery confirms that planets can be in a cohesive form within 3 million years, which was previously unclear as Earth took 10 to 20 million years to form," said Madyson Barber, a graduate student in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature.
"We don't really know how long it takes for planets to form," UNC astrophysicist and study co-author Andrew Mann added. "We know that giant planets must form faster than their disk dissipates because they need a lot of gas from the disk. But disks take 5 to 10 million years to dissipate. So do planets form in 1 million years? 5? 10?"
The planet, given the names IRAS 04125+2902 b and TIDYE-1b, orbits its star every 8.8 days at a distance about one-fifth that separating our solar system's innermost planet Mercury from the sun. Its mass is in between that of Earth, the largest of our solar system's rocky planets, and Neptune, the smallest of the gas planets. It is less dense than Earth and has a diameter about 11 times greater. Its chemical composition is not known.
The researchers suspect that the planet formed further away from its star and then migrated inward.
"Forming large planets close to the star is difficult because the protoplanetary disk dissipates away from closest to the star the fastest, meaning there's not enough material to form a large planet that close that quickly," Barber said.
The researchers detected it using what is called the "transit" method, observing a dip in the host star's brightness when the planet passes in front of it, from the perspective of a viewer on Earth. It was found by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, space telescope.
"This is the youngest-known transiting planet. It is on par with the youngest planets known," Barber said.
Exoplanets not detected using this method sometimes are directly imaged using telescopes. But these typically are massive ones, around 10 times greater than our solar system's largest planet Jupiter.
Stars and planets form from clouds of interstellar gas and dust.
"To form a star-planet system, the cloud of gas and dust will collapse and spin into a flat environment, with the star at the center and the disk surrounding it. Planets will form in that disk. The disk will then dissipate starting from the inner region near the star," Barber said.
"It was previously thought that we wouldn't be able to find a transiting planet this young because the disk would be in the way. But for some reason that we aren't sure of, the outer disk is warped, leaving a perfect window to the star and allowing us to detect the transit," Barber added.