In the most clarity to date, astronomers have a snapshot of the birth of a planet thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope.
According to BBC News, the telescope cannot see such an event take place with visible light due to the high amounts of gas and dust that surround a forming planet. ALMA had to use a different, longer wavelength whose signal came from antennas spread 15km apart.
HL Tau, the sun hosting the planet, is about 450 light years from Earth and resides in the Taurus constellation.
"These features are almost certainly the result of young planet-like bodies that are being formed in the disk. This is surprising since HL Tau is no more than a million years old and such young stars are not expected to have large planetary bodies capable of producing the structures we see in this image," ALMA deputy director Stuartt Corder said in a press release.
Dr Aprajita Verma, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, called the new image "phenomenal."
"This shows how exciting Alma is going to be - it's going to be an incredible instrument," she told BBC News. "I think the big result is that you might have expected just a smooth disc.
"But you're really seeing multiple rings - and where it's darker, that's where you've cleared the material already in the disc," she said. "It means that things are coagulating. It's really a planetary system, that you're seeing at a very early time.
"These rings will form planets, asteroids, comets... And eventually as the star evolves, this will cool and settle and there will be more clearing and more individual objects, just like we see in our solar system."
