Astronomers spot newborn alien solar system in rare cosmic first

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Astronomers spot newborn alien solar system in rare cosmic first

Ana Zirojević 2025-07-18

As outer space continues to tickle our imagination, astronomers have just witnessed a newborn alien solar system for the first time ever, providing them with a front-row seat on the earliest stages of planet formation.

Indeed, an international research team has used combined observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to observe the protostar HOPS-315, sharing their findings in the Nature journal on July 16.

Observing the newborn alien solar system

Specifically, the protostar lies in a giant star-forming region about 1,400 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Orion. It weighs in at 0.6 solar mass and should someday grow into a star much like our own Sun, helping scientists study the first stages of our solar system’s history.

As it happens, the astronomers have also gotten a chance to explore other structures around HOPS-315 in remarkable detail, especially a whirling halo of hot gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk, where clumps of rock called planetesimals merge to eventually form planets.

Meanwhile, the protostar’s very young age and tilt at a certain angle with respect to our solar system allow astronomers to see deeper and closer to it. According to Fred Ciesla, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago who peer-reviewed the Nature paper and wrote an accompanying commentary:

“It has a hot inner disk that’s still going through this early phase, and it’s oriented so we can actually see it. That makes it very special, and I expect we still have a lot to learn from it.”

Elsewhere, astronomers have had the chance to experience another rare space occurrence – the biggest ever merger of colliding fast-spinning, so-called ‘forbidden’ black holes that challenge the established rules of physics, with major implications for scientists’ understanding of how such bodies grow in the universe.

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Ana Zirojević Crypto journalist and market analyst with 7+ years of experience covering digital assets, blockchain technology, and data-driven market analysis.