Scientists have now witnessed the birth of a new solar system for the first time thanks to one revolutionary new piece of technology, and it's allowed them to see in action the materials that will go on to make up new planets.
Astronomers have been able to use telescopes to spot objects in space miles and miles away for centuries now, as shown perfectly by the recent discussions involving asteroid 16 Psyche, which was initially discovered all the way back in 1852.
However, new space technology allows scientists to look further than ever before, and we're able to find a whole number of fascinating discoveries that would have otherwise been impossible to spot, including planets which have remarkable similarities to Earth.
However, one of the most staggering recent spots involves the birth of a new solar system, and this was only possible thanks to an incredibly powerful telescope that can look over 1,300 light-years into the distance.
What have scientists spotted using the telescope?
As reported by the Independent, scientists have managed to observe the the beginnings of a new solar system using both the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), and it looks awfully like what we imagine the early stages of our Sun would have been.
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Merel van 't Hoff, co-author of the Nature-published study and professor at Purdue University, explained that what they observed was like "a picture of a baby solar system," adding that "we're seeing a system that looks like what our solar system looked like when it was just beginning to form."
The new system in question is being born around a baby star named 'HOPS-315', which is located roughly 1,300 light-years away from Earth, equating to around 7,642,212,985,138,690 miles or 35,608,112 years in a manned spacecraft.
What does the birth of a solar system look like?
The visual representation of a solar system's beginnings isn't actually what you might expect, as it largely amounts to a collection of rocks and gases that will eventually go on to form small planets over the years.
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"Terrestrial planets and small bodies in our solar system are theorized to have assembled from interstellar solids mixed with rocky solids that precipitated from a hot, cooling gas," the study outlines. "The first high-temperature minerals to recondense from this gaseous reservoir start the clock on planet formation."
What the scientists actually found was "a reservoir of warm silicon monoxide gas and crystalline silicate minerals low in the atmosphere of a disk within 2.2 AU (astronomical unit) of the [HOPS-315] star.
"Our results indicate that the environment in the inner disk region is influenced by the sublimation of interstellar solids and subsequent refractory solid recondensation from this gas reservoir on the timescales comparable with refractory condensation in our own solar system," it concludes.
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What this discovery illuminates is not just what the formation of a new solar system looks like - which was previously never witnessed by humans - but also what the beginnings of our very own solar system could have been, which continues to inform the history of our surroundings.