A "huge space discovery" may hold the secret to the formation of emerging planets

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Astronomers have discovered that a huge planetary disk, with a diameter of about 3,300 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, is a stronghold for new emerging planets orbiting a young star.

The research team, from the United States and Germany, revealed that the disk contains enough gas and dust to form super-sized planets in distant orbits.

The disk "IRAS 23077", surrounding a star located 1,000 light-years away, was first observed in 2016, but recent observations with telescopes in Hawaii revealed that it is "the largest known group of planet-forming components."

Lead author Christina Munsch, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that the planetary disk is so massive and carries the basic building blocks of planets, that scientists can learn more about “the birth and evolution of worlds outside our world.”

She added that NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes were able to detect whether the formed planets were "the size of Jupiter or larger." Any rocky planets (like ours) are likely to be too small to be seen, and there may be larger planet-forming systems.

The results were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.