How Planets Begin: Mapping the Dust Around Baby Stars

By Space.Fan Editorial DeskSeptember 27, 2026 at 11:02 AM UTC

Astronomers used a powerful telescope to look at the dusty cocoons surrounding young stars to see how baby planets are born.

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The Drop

When s are just being born, they are surrounded by a flat, spinning cloud of gas and dust called a disk. Scientists want to know how these disks eventually turn into s. To find out, researchers used the ALMA telescope to take a close look at 23 of these young systems. By studying the radio light coming from the dust in these disks, they were able to create detailed maps of what the material looks like. Usually, astronomers use simple shapes to guess how much dust is in a disk. This new study found that those simple shapes do not work well. Instead, the team used a more complex method that accounts for how the light fades and spreads out. This helped them see that most of these young disks are actually quite smooth and do not have many gaps yet. They found that the size of these dusty disks depends on the weight of the in the middle. The bigger the , the bigger the disk usually is. They also noticed that s living in pairs, called binary systems, tend to have smaller disks than s that live alone. This gives us a new clue about how a 's environment changes its early life. Surprisingly, only two of the systems they looked at had clear rings or gaps in their dust. These rings are often where baby s are growing, so finding them so rarely in this sample suggests that these structures usually form later in a 's life.

Why It Matters

This research is a big deal because it helps us understand the timeline of building. By showing that most very young s have smooth disks without rings, it tells scientists that the process of forming s happens in stages. We now have a clearer picture of what a system looks like before it ts forming major s.

The Catch

It is hard to tell exactly what is happening inside the densest parts of these disks because the dust can block our view. Even though the models show us the overall shape of the disk, scientists cannot always be sure if they are seeing the physical structure of the disk or just how the gas is interacting with light.

Put That in Perspective

In the past, telescopes were not sharp enough to see these details. By comparing 23 different systems in a consistent way, researchers have created a baseline that future studies will use to test whether these patterns hold up in even younger or more distant star systems.

Source September 27, 2026

Mayank Narang, Jerry Xu, Leslie W. Looney, Nagayoshi Ohashi, Anika Khandavalli, Patrick Sheehan, Jonathan P. Williams, Shigehisa Takakuwa, Jes K. Jørgensen, Ilseung Han, Woojin Kwon, Zhi-Yun Li, Nguyen Thi Phuong

Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Illinois, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Institute for Astronomy University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Niels Bohr Institute, Institut de Ciències de l’Espai, Seoul National University, University of Virginia, Vietnam National Space Center·The Astronomical Journal·10.3847/1538-3881/ae9bb0