It’s not every day scientists get to watch a planet start to form out of stars. But that’s exactly what happened.
A team of scientists, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory in Chile, caught something we’ve never seen before — the very beginning of rocky planet formation. That alone is wild. But what makes it even more exciting? It happened around a young star a lot like our own sun.
That star is called HOPS-315, and it’s about 1,370 light-years from us. It’s still a baby, what scientists call a “young star,” surrounded by a thick cloud of gas and dust. Inside that cloud, something amazing is going on: tiny solid particles are starting to form. And those little bits? They’re the first step toward building rocky planets like Earth, Mars, and maybe even the ones orbiting near Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
The discovery was led by Melissa McClure from Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and the team saw something we’ve never caught in action before: solid materials like silicon monoxide and crystalline silicate forming right inside the dusty disk. This is planetary formation at its rawest and most real. And we were lucky enough to see it.
This isn’t just “cool,” it’s a first
Here’s why this matters: it’s the first time scientists have directly observed hot minerals condensing in the early stages of a solar system. These minerals are the earliest building blocks of rocky planets. They’re what start it all.
And the spot where they’re forming? It lines up with a region in our own solar system: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That similarity is hard to ignore. It suggests that maybe, just maybe, this process isn’t rare. Maybe this is how rocky planets form everywhere.
Until now, it was mostly theory. Now, we’ve actually seen it happen.
Is HOPS-315 building its own solar system?
Right now, we don’t know how many planets this system might end up with. But based on the amount of material in its disk, scientists think it could form as many as eight. Sound familiar?
We’re still a long way from knowing for sure; these things take millions of years, but the early signs are promising. And according to Merel Van ‘t Hoff, a member of the research team, this is just the beginning.
Now that we know what to look for, astronomers can search for more stars in this early phase. And with all the tools and technology they have available today, like the James Webb Space Telescope, it doesn’t sound like an impossible task anymore. The more we find, the more we’ll understand how systems like ours come to be.
Does it feel like déjà vu?
Even if you’re not deep into space science, this kind of discovery hits different although it sounds like something we know already. It gives us a glimpse into the very beginning, the moment when dust starts turning into something real. Into a planet.
Fred Ciesla from the University of Chicago puts it like this: we’re seeing the starting point. The “zero moment.” And that’s something we’ve never been able to study up close until now.
Thanks to the space observatory that captured it all, the work of NASA, and the incredible observatories in Chile, we’re not just looking deeper into space. We’re looking into our own past. Into how Earth, our home, might have started. Theories will now be able to be proved.
We don’t know if HOPS-315 will ever be home to planets, oceans, trees, or cities. But we know this: right now, it’s beginning the same story we’re already in the middle of.