These Baby Stars Have Mysterious Companions

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Tits collection of cosmic baby photos contains 31 young star systems, images captured by the Large Millimeter Array in Atacama, Chile. In the lower right corner you’ll find a simulation of our own solar system just 1 million years old. The nascent stars at the centers of these systems formed from large clumps of very cold dust and gas that warped under their own gravity. Over the course of several millennia, this material transforms into disks with dense, sizzling centers that turn into stars.

The surrounding disks are known as protoplanetary disks, and scientists believe that the remnants of gas and dust within them clump together to create planets. But all this material makes this possible phenomenon difficult to observe.

With the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, astronomers have successfully filtered out the noise to discern potential planet formation around these growing stars. Gaia was able to detect the “wobble” or gravitational pull of a planet on a star. The telescope could also detect the attraction of other types of objects orbiting a central star, called “companions.”

Read more: »Before there were stars»

Data from Gaia has already shed light on companions dancing around older stars. Now, researchers have used the same method to track companions and planets around emerging stars, according to results reported in a paper expected to be published in Astronomy and astrophysics.

The cyan symbols in these images refer to the estimated locations of companions within these star systems. These buddies can include additional stars, objects with planet-like mass and brown dwarfs, or objects larger than planets but smaller than stars. Like our solar system, the cyan symbol represents the orbit of Jupiter.

On a sample of 98 young star systems, an international team of scientists “detected subtle movements suggesting the presence of invisible companions” in these 31 systems, according to a press release.

Gaia retired last March, but powerful tools like the James Webb Space Telescope can inspect the internal disks of these young star systems to illuminate the first steps of new worlds.

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Main image: SO, ESA/Gaia/DPAC, M. Vioque et al.

• Molly Glick

  Published on December 19, 2025

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.