We just watched a solar system take its first breath.
For the first time ever, astronomers caught the exact moment planets begin forming around a star other than our Sun.
The baby star is HOPS-315, sitting about 1,300 light years away in Orion. It looks a lot like our Sun did when it was young.
Using James Webb and the ALMA telescope in Chile, researchers spotted hot minerals packed with silicon monoxide starting to turn solid in the star’s disc. Those specks clump into pebbles, then kilometre-sized planetesimals, then full planets.
The same kind of minerals are trapped inside ancient meteorites from our own solar system.
So this is basically a baby photo of where Earth came from