08/23/2025
🚨 Scientists just caught a solar system being born!
You are looking at the birth of entire worlds.
Astronomers have witnessed something unprecedented: the very first steps of a solar system being born.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope alongside the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers observed HOPS-315, a young star just 1,300 light-years away.
At about 60% the mass of our Sun, the star is still forming and surrounded by a dense, swirling disk of gas and dust. Unlike past discoveries that captured young planets already shaping their environments, this observation shows the earliest spark of planet formation—when raw minerals first begin condensing out of gas.
In the disk, scientists detected clumps of silicon monoxide gas and crystalline silicate minerals, the same building blocks that once seeded Earth, Mars, and Jupiter.
This makes HOPS-315 the earliest stage of planet formation ever seen, a window into what our own solar system looked like over 4.5 billion years ago. Over the next million years, the star is expected to grow into a sunlike star, while its dusty disk gradually assembles into planets.
For astronomers, it’s a breathtaking chance to watch the origin of worlds unfold in real time.
Source: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/M. McClure et al.
