A group of scientists has spotted a region where moons are forming around a planet outside our solar system surrounded by a huge halo of gas and dust enough to give birth to three moons the size of ours.
According to Reuters, scientists used the ALMA telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile to observe the disk, which contains material accumulating on each other in a vortex-like motion around one of two newborn planets orbiting a young star called BD. S-70 is located at a relatively close distance from Earth of 370 light-years.
The researchers commented on the discovery, saying that it allows a deeper understanding of the formation process at the beginning of life for planets and moons.
“These observations are unique so far and we have been waiting for a long time to put the theory of planet formation to the test and to monitor the birth of planets and their moons as they occur,” said astronomer Myriam Benisti of the University of Grenoble, who led the study.
Outside our solar system, more than 4,400 planets have been discovered, but no planetary disks have been found before because all known exoplanets to date are in fully mature solar systems except for the two newborn gaseous planets around the star (BDS 70).