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Astronomers Witness Birth of a Solar System for the First Time

The recent discovery might help astronomers pick apart the mystery behind our own solar system.

Astronomers have gotten one step closer to discovering how our solar system was created. An international research team revealed in a study Wednesday that they have captured a photo of the early stages of planets being formed around an infant star, protostar HOPS-315, for the first time ever. This could offer a glimpse into “time zero” of our solar system, when planets began to form around the sun. Purdue University professor and co-author of the study, Merel van ‘t Hoff, said that “we’re seeing a system that looks like what our Solar System looked like when it was just beginning to form.” “This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our Solar System,” she said. Observations gathered from both the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile helped uncover the birth of this planetary system located in the Orion constellation, around 1,300 light-years away. Fred Ciesla, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago who peer-reviewed the study, said that the planetary system was like “a unicorn.” “It’s oriented so we can actually see it. That makes it very special, and I expect we still have a lot to learn from it,” he said.