Astronomers have, for the first time, discovered the moment when planets started to form around a sun-like baby star, scientists reported Wednesday.
The specks of planet-forming material are emerging around HOPS-315, a protostar or baby star located 1,300 light-years away from us. One light year is approximately 5.88 trillion miles.
While astronomers have seen discs of gas and dust around protostars before, they’ve never before identified a new planetary system at such an early stage. Minerals in the system around HOPS-315 are just starting to form.
“We’re seeing a system that looks like what our Solar System looked like when it was just beginning to form,” study co-author Merel van ‘t Hoff, a professor at Purdue University, said in a news release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The observatory paired up with NASA’s Webb Space Telescope to identify the minerals forming the new solar system. Researchers turned to data from our own solar system to determine that these minerals show the start of a new system. In Earth’s solar system, the first solid materials to form can now be found inside ancient meteorites. Those ancient meteorites contain a mineral called silicon monoxide, which only forms at extremely high temperatures, like those near a young star.
Scientists were able to identify the formation of silicon monoxide around HOPS-315, which they said tells them they’ve caught the development of a solar system at an early stage.
“This is the first time this early stage of planet-building has ever been observed outside our own Solar System,” the Planetary Society wrote in a social media post about the discovery.
The discovery marks “the birth of the seeds of the planets,” study co-author Edwin Bergin, a professor at the University of Michigan, told CBS News. The silicate-mineral rich material around HOPS-315 will make planets after another million years or so.
“So we are watching the beginnings of the construction of planets,” Bergin said.
With the discovery, Bergin said researchers now know what to look for to find other budding systems.
ESO’s Alma telescope network in Chile captured an image of the still-forming planetary system around HOPS-315. In orange, the image shows the distribution of carbon monoxide blowing away from HOPS-315. Blue shows a narrow jet of silicon monoxide, which is also beaming away from the baby star.
Astronomers hope it can help them learn more about the dawn of our solar system.
“This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our Solar System,” van ‘t Hoff said in a news release.
HOPS-315 is much younger than the Sun; it’s about 100,000 years old, Bergin said.
“So we get a glimpse of the system in its infancy,” Bergin said in an email. “Given that the Sun is 4.6 Billion years old this is a baby star that is still gaining mass and getting bigger.”
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