Astronomers said Wednesday that they had observed the moment when the planets begin to form around a distant star for the first time, revealing a process that sheds light on the birth of our own solar system.
The new planetary system is being formed around Baby Star Hops-315, which resembles our own sun in its youth, to 1,300 light years of the earth in the Orion Nebula.
Young stars are surrounded by mass and dust rings called protoplanetary discs, which is where the planets are formed. Within these swirl discs, crystalline minerals containing chemical silicon monoxide can be grouped.
This process can snow ball in “planetsimal” the size of a kilometers size, which one day becomes complete planets.
In our homemade solar system, it is believed that crystalline minerals that were the starting mass for the Earth and Jupiter’s core were trapped in ancient meteorites.
Now astronomers have seen signs that suggest that these hot minerals are beginning to solidify in the album that surrounds Hops-315, according to a new study in the magazine Nature.
“For the first time, we have identified the first moment in which the formation of the planet begins around a star that is not our sun,” said the author of the main study Melissa McClure of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in a statement.
The minerals around the star were first seen by the James Webb space telescope. Then, astronomers used the millimeter/submilimetre (soul) matrix telescope of the South European Observatory in Chile to find out exactly where chemical signals came from.
They discovered that these minerals are in a small portion of the album, which is similar to the asteroid belt surrounding our sun.
This will allow scientists to observe the process that our native planet may have given birth.
“We are seeing a system that seems like our solar system when it was just beginning to form,” said Co -author of the Merel Van’t Hoff study of Purdue University in the United States.
