Astronomers photograph planets forming - or maybe it's a star

Space

Technological Innovation Website Editorial Team - July 21, 2025

The image on the left shows the possible planet being born around the young star HD 135344B. The image on the right is a combination of observations made with the VLT (red) and ALMA (orange and blue). [Image: ESO/F. Maio et al./T. Stolker et al./ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/N. van der Marel et al.]

Planet in formation

Shortly after photographing the birth of a new solar system for the first time , astronomers have now photographed a planet still in formation, carving an intricate pattern in the gas and dust surrounding its young star.

The VLT telescope in Chile has captured a planetary disk with prominent spiral arms, clear signs that a planet is nestled in its innermost regions. This is the first time a direct photograph of a future planet has been obtained within a spiral protoplanetary disk.

"We will never witness the formation of Earth, but 440 light-years away from here, around a young star, we may be watching a planet form in real time," said Francesco Maio of the University of Florence in Italy.

The planet is forming around the star HD 135344B, within a disk of gas and dust surrounding it, called a protoplanetary disk. The forming planet is estimated to be twice the size of Jupiter and as far from its host star as Neptune is from the Sun.

It appears to be shaping the material surrounding it within the protoplanetary disk as it grows into a fully formed planet.

Protoplanetary disks are structures we observe around young stars that often exhibit intricate patterns, such as rings, voids, or spirals. Astronomers have long predicted that these patterns are caused by forming planets, which sweep up material as they orbit their parent star. However, until now, one of these "planetary sculptors" had never been observed in action.

"What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we were able to directly detect the signal from the protoplanet, which is still very much hidden within the disk," Maio said. "This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the planet's existence, since we are observing the light from the planet itself."

It is still unclear what this celestial body detected next to the star V960 Mon is. [Image: Anuroop Dasgupta et al. - 10.3847/2041-8213/ade996]

Formation of a star?

Another team of astronomers spotted something new, as they observed the star V960 Mon, which is still in the early stages of its life.

In fact, astronomers still don't know what they discovered, only that it is a companion object of this young star - the exact nature of this object still remains a mystery.

Data collected by the VLT and the ALMA radio telescope show that the material orbiting V960 Mon appears in the form of a series of intricate spiral arms, but they are fragmenting in a process known as gravitational instability. This process occurs when large clumps of material around a star contract and collapse, each with the potential to form a planet or larger object.

The team discovered the star's potential companion object very close to one of the spiral arms. They suggest it could be either a planet in the making or a brown dwarf, an object larger than a planet but not massive enough to initiate nuclear fusion and shine like a star.

If this is the case, which should be confirmed by new observations, it would be the first clear detection of a planet or brown dwarf forming through gravitational instability.

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