First pictures of a solar system in the making

A view of the star HOPS-315, a potential future center of a planetary system, taken by the ALMA radio telescope in Chile. In orange and blue, jets of gas are emitted by the star, around which a disk of dust and gas will be the site of future planets. ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/MCCLURE

Astronomers can have the same joy in certain images of the sky as a family rediscovering slightly faded childhood photographs. Thus, an international team led by Melissa McClure (Leiden University, Netherlands) presented, on July 16 in Nature , images and analyses of what could be a "baby solar system." A baby so young (about 100,000 years old) that it contains a star, HOPS-315, half the size of our Sun, but not yet a terrestrial planet like ours, nor even large asteroids. Only dust and gas gathered in a sort of disk around the star.

This proto-solar system is located in the vast Orion Nebula, about 1,400 light-years from Earth, and was examined in 2023 by the American-European James Webb Space Telescope , in orbit since 2022, and by the ALMA radio telescope in Chile.

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