The key to unlocking the origins of life may lie in studying when and how planetary systems similar to ours form. A new large-scale study using revolutionary technology has shown that this process begins incredibly early — planets form almost simultaneously with their very young stars.
Protoplanetary disks are giant clouds of cold gas and dust spinning around newborn stars. This is where planets are born. The gravity of the planet embryo “carves” characteristic structures into the disk – rings, rays, or spirals. These substructures are a kind of “message” from the forming planets. To decode them, you need super-sensitive radio telescopes like ALMA.
Mystery of time: when do planets form?
Previous large-scale ALMA projects, such as DSHARP and eDisk, have already revealed the distribution of dust in disks. DSHARP discovered many structures in the disks of stars older than 1 million years. However, the eDisk project, which studied much younger stars aged 10,000-100,000 years, found significantly fewer such signs. This raised a key question: when exactly do the first planets appear in the disks? The answer required observations of intermediate-age disks, but technical limitations made it difficult to obtain a large sample.
An international team of scientists solved this problem by applying an innovative image processing method called sparse modeling. Using PRIISM (Python module for Radio Interferometry Imaging with Sparse Modeling), they extracted maximum information from ALMA archive data, observing 78 disks in the Ophiuchus star-forming region (460 light-years away). This technology made it possible to obtain images with three times higher resolution than traditional methods using the same data.
Unexpected conclusions
The sample size of this study is almost four times larger than that of DSHARP and eDisk combined, which makes the statistics extremely convincing. The analysis revealed 27 discs with clear ring or spiral structures, 15 of which were identified for the first time thanks to the new high-resolution technique.
By combining data from the stellar nursery with data from the young eDisk project, scientists have made a sensational discovery. Characteristic substructures, signs of active planet formation, are clearly evident at a very early stage in the life of a star – just a few hundred thousand years after its birth. These structures have been detected in disks with a radius greater than 30 AU.
This means that planets begin to form much earlier than previously thought, when the protoplanetary disk is still very young, massive, and rich in gas and dust. In other words, planets do not simply appear later around a star — they grow together with it practically from the moment of its birth.
This discovery radically changes our understanding of the pace at which planetary systems form and opens up new horizons in the search for answers to questions about the origin of life in the Universe.
Earlier, we reported on how astronomers observed the birth of new planets in a binary system.
According to Phys
