Scientists watch a solar system being born for the first ever time

Distant forming planets are like a picture of our solar system as a baby

(ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/M. McClure et al.)

Scientists have watched a solar system being born for the first ever time.

Using a powerful telescope, researchers saw the first pieces of material that will go onto form planets.

A solar system has never been seen this early in its formation before. Researchers hope that the breakthrough discovery will allow for a new understanding of how such systems form – including our own.

The findings are like “a picture of the baby Solar System”, said Merel van ‘t Hoff, a professor at Purdue University, USA, and a co-author on the new study. “We're seeing a system that looks like what our Solar System looked like when it was just beginning to form.”

The new system is being born around HOPS-315, a baby star located around 1300 light-years away. Researchers believe that it looks like our Sun would have done in its youth.

Those baby stars often have “protoplanetary discs” around them, made up of dust and gas that will eventually clump together and form the beginnings of planets. Researchers have seen massive newborn planets in those discs before, but they have now spotted those baby planets as they begin to form.

The work is described in a new paper, ‘Refractory solid condensation detected in an embedded protoplanetary disk’, published in the journal Nature.

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