New Earths in the making? Astronomers capture glimpse of planets being born around a baby Sun, watch here

Astronomers Capture Birth of Planets Around Baby Sun-Like Star

In a breakthrough that brings us closer to understanding the birth of planetary systems like our own, astronomers have directly observed the earliest known stages of rocky planet formation around a young, sun-like star. The discovery offers a rare and compelling window into how planets like Earth may have started to take shape.

Led by Melissa McClure of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, an international team of scientists detected solid materials condensing inside the swirling gas disk of a protostar named HOPS-315, located approximately 1,370 light-years away in the constellation Orion. The star is believed to be just 100,000 to 200,000 years old — practically an infant on the cosmic timeline.

“This is the clearest evidence we've ever had of rocky planet formation beginning at such an early stage,” McClure said. “We’re seeing the exact moment when solid materials, the building blocks of Earth-like planets, begin to form.”

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The discovery, published in Nature on Wednesday, was made possible through a collaboration between NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s ALMA telescope network in Chile. These high-resolution instruments allowed scientists to peer deep into the gas-rich protoplanetary disk and detect minerals essential to rocky planets.

Among the materials observed were silicon monoxide gas and crystalline silicate grains — the same types of particles believed to have seeded rocky worlds in our own solar system over 4.5 billion years ago. These minerals were found in the inner regions of the disk, roughly where our solar system’s asteroid belt is located, between Mars and Jupiter.

Fred Ciesla, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago who was not part of the study, called the findings “a monumental step forward” in our understanding of how solar systems emerge.

“This is what astronomers have hoped to see for decades — not just young stars and their gas disks, but actual solid materials forming in the very region where rocky planets like Earth could appear,” Ciesla noted.

One of the most exciting aspects of the discovery is that these solid particles appear to form naturally as a part of star and disk evolution, suggesting that Earth-like planet formation may be a universal process, not a unique event limited to our solar system.

The team also captured a vivid image using ALMA, showing the glowing disk of HOPS-315 against the vast darkness of space — a cosmic “lightning bug” caught in the act of world-building.

While it’s still too early to say how many planets might eventually form around HOPS-315, its massive gas disk has the potential to evolve into a system with several planets, possibly even resembling our own solar system.

Looking ahead, astronomers like co-author Merel van 't Hoff from Purdue University aim to study more young stars at this early stage. The hope is to determine whether such planet-forming processes are common across the galaxy — and whether Earth-like planets are the norm, or a cosmic rarity.

“Understanding how often this happens is the key to answering one of humanity’s oldest questions — are we alone, or is Earth just one of many?” van 't Hoff said.

(With inputs from AP)