When we look at the stars, we are not usually moved by longing for the distant depths of space. When we look outside, we are actually looking at ourselves. We are trying to understand our place in the incredible expanses of the universe. One of the most pressing questions we face is how unique we are. Did life arise only here on Earth, or is our galaxy merging with it?

The first step to understanding this is to understand how special the Earth, and by extension our entire solar system, really is. This requires knowledge of how solar systems actually form. And that’s exactly what my colleagues and I have begun to discover with the help of a new set of studies of star-forming regions.

In recent years, astronomers have observed more than 5,000 planets around distant stars, called exoplanets. We now know that there are so many planets that when you look at almost any star in the night sky, you can be pretty sure there are planets orbiting it. So what do these planets look like?

The first planet discovered around a Sun-like star shocked us. It was a massive gas giant, called hot Jupiter, orbiting its parent star in such a tight orbit that a year was only four days long. This is truly an alien world unlike any other in our solar system.

After this groundbreaking initial discovery, astronomers went even further and found densely packed super-Earth systems, rocky planets several times larger than Earth, and incredible gas giants in orbits of hundreds of years around their parent stars. Of the many planetary systems we have discovered, none compare to our solar system. In fact, most are quite different.

To understand how all these different systems came to be, we need to go back to the beginning. These are magnificent disks of dust and gas surrounding the youngest stars. These are the nurseries that will eventually give birth to new planetary systems.

These disks are massive objects with a length several hundred times greater than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But they look very small in the sky. That’s because even the closest ones, which are pretty much in our galaxy’s backyard, are 600 to 1,600 light-years away.

This is a short distance considering that the Milky Way Galaxy is more than 100,000 light-years across, but it still means that light, the fastest light in the universe, would take up to 1,600 years to reach us.

The typical size of one of these planetary feeders as seen from Earth would be an angle on the sky of 1 “arcsecond,” the equivalent of 1/3,600th of a degree. In perspective, this is like observing a person standing atop the Eiffel Tower in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, from 500 km away.

We need the most advanced and largest telescopes to observe these disks. And we need advanced tools that can correct the atmospheric turbulence that blurs our images. This is no small engineering feat, as the latest generation of vehicles has only been available for about a decade.

new discoveries

We began searching for the nearest young stars using the European Southern Observatory’s “Very Large Telescope,” the VLT, and the Sphere Extreme Adaptive Optics Camera. Our team, which included scientists from more than ten countries, managed to observe more than 80 of these young stars in incredible detail; Our findings were published in a series of articles in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

All images were taken in near-infrared light, invisible to the human eye. They show light from distant young stars reflected from tiny dust particles in the disks. This dust resembles sand on a beach and eventually comes together to form new planets.

We discovered an incredible variety of shapes and forms in these planetary feeders. Some have huge ring systems, others have large spiral arms. Some are smooth and calm, while others are caught in the middle of a storm as dust and gas from surrounding star-forming clouds fall on them.

Although we would expect such a change, our research shows for the first time that this is true even in the same star-forming regions. Thus, even planetary systems formed in the same region can look completely different. The discovery of such a wide range of disks suggests that the wide variety of exoplanets discovered so far is a result of this wide range of planetary nurseries.

Unlike the Sun, most stars in our galaxy have moons consisting of two or more stars orbiting a common center of mass. Looking at the constellation Orion, we found that stars in groups of two or more are less likely than single stars to have large planet-forming disks. This is useful to know when searching for exoplanets. Another interesting finding is how irregular the discs in this area are; This suggests that it may contain massive planets that distort the disks.

The next step in our research will be to cradle specific planets to understand in detail how various systems may have formed. We also want to get closer to the deepest regions of these disks, where terrestrial planets like our Earth begin to form.

To do this, we will use next-generation telescopes, led by the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert. There are many questions that need to be answered. But thanks to our research, we now know that the first step on the long journey to the emergence of life is extremely beautiful.