Astronomers capture the birth of planets around a baby sun outside our solar system

Astronomers discovered the first seeds of rocky planets forming in gas around a solar baby star, providing a precious overview of our own solar system.

It is an unprecedented snapshot of “Time Zero”, scientists reported on Wednesday, when new worlds are starting to gelify.

“We have captured a direct overview of the hot region where rocky planets like the land are born around young protostars,” said Melissa McClure of the Netherlands of the Leiden Observatory, who managed the international research team. “For the first time, we can say in a conclusive way that the first stages of the planet formation are currently performing.”

Observations offer a unique overview of the internal functioning of an emerging planetary system, said the Fred Ciesla of the University of Chicago, which was not involved in the study appearing in the journal Nature.

“This is one of the things we expected. Astronomers are thinking about how planetary systems have been formed for a long time,” said Ciesla. “There is a rich opportunity here.”

The NASA webb space telescope and the Southern European Observatory in Chile joined forces to reveal these first planetary training nuggets around the young star known as HOPS-315. It is a yellow dwarf in manufacturing like the sun, but much younger at 100,000 to 200,000 years and around 1,370 light years. A single light year is 6 billions of Miles.

In a first cosmic, McClure and his team looked deep into the gas disc around the baby’s star and detected solid condensation spots – training signals from the early planet. A gap in the outer part of the disc allowed them to look inside, thanks to the way in which the star bowed to the earth.

They detected silicon monoxide as well as crystalline silicate minerals, the ingredients of what would be the first solid materials to form in our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. The action takes place in a location comparable to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter containing the remaining construction elements of the planets of our solar system.

The condensation of hot minerals has never been detected before in other young stars, “so we did not know if it was a universal characteristic of planet formation or a strange characteristic of our solar system,” said McClure in an email. “Our study shows that this could be a common process during the first stage of the planet’s training.”

Although other research has examined younger gas discs and, more often, mature disks with potential aspirants to the planet, there has been no specific evidence for the start of the planet’s formation so far, McClure said.

In a breathtaking photo taken by the ALMA telescope network of the ESO, the emerging planetary system resembles a shiny lightning bug against the black vacuum.

It is impossible to know how many planets could form around Hops-315. With a gas disc as massive as the sun could have been, it could also end with eight planets per million or more years, according to McClure.

Merel van ‘T Hoff from the Purdue University, a co-author, is eager to find more grassy planetary systems. By throwing a wider net, astronomers can look for similarities and determine which processes could be crucial to forming earth -shaped worlds.

“Are there any planets similar to the earth or are we so special that we do not expect it to happen very often?”

© 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material cannot be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed without authorization.