This star offers the earliest glimpse at the birth of a planetary system like ours
The birth of a new solar system may have been caught on camera.
About 1,400 light-years from Earth sits a young sunlike star surrounded by cooling gas and teensy silicate minerals. These mineral solids — some of the building blocks of rocky planets — are among the first to condense from the gas, suggesting that they’re kick-starting the creation of planets in a system much like the one earthlings call home, researchers report in the July 17 Nature.
“It really is the first time we’ve seen this stage of planet formation in the process,” says planetary scientist Laura Schaefer of Stanford University, who was not involved in the new study. Observing the timeline of these early hot minerals will help researchers better understand how events unfolded billions of years ago in the solar system.
Clues about its earliest stages have primarily come from remnants of the incidents trapped in meteorites. The oldest space rocks suggest that the formation of certain minerals at very high temperatures starts the clock. This is the “t=0 moment,” says astronomer Melissa McClure of Leiden University in the Netherlands. “At this moment, the solar system first started to form, and then planets can form after this point.” [Continue reading…]