FOR the first time, astronomers have managed to record the moment a new planet formed while forming a disk of dust around it. This rare phenomenon was detected around the young star HD 135344B, which is about 440 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.
The team of astronomers used the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the ERIS infrared instrument to capture this latest image. In observations—which have been published in journals Astrophysical Journal Lettersthey found a dense bright signal appearing at the origin of one of the spirals in the stardust disk, which is believed to be a young planet still gathering mass.
“We will never be able to witness the formation of the Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light years away, we may be watching a planet form directly,” said Francesco Maio of the University of Florence, lead author of the study, quoted in the report EarthOctober 11, 2025.
The planet is about 4.5 billion kilometers from its parent star, equivalent to the distance from Neptune to the Sun, and is estimated to have twice the mass of Jupiter. Such a large size allows the planet to form pathways in the surrounding gas and produce the spiral arms visible in the disk.
“What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we were able to detect the protoplanetary signal directly, even though it was still embedded in the disk,” said Maio, who now works at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Italy. “This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the existence of the planet, because we are observing the light of the planet itself.”
The spiral image in HD 135344B was first seen in 2018 via the SPHERE instrument, which previously showed a distinctive pattern due to the young planet’s gravitational pull. The latest results from ERIS are now the clearest evidence so far of the existence of a planet forming within the disk.
The ERIS instrument was also used to examine another star, V960 Mon, which experienced a sudden increase in light in 2014 and belongs to the rare class of FU Orionis. Observations show that the star’s disk is filled with dense spirals and clumps due to gravitational instability, which could lead to the formation of gas giant planets or brown dwarfs.
“Previous studies showed the presence of unstable material, but it was not known what happened next. With ERIS, we wanted to look for bright, dense fragments that would indicate the presence of a companion in the disk, and we found it,” said ESO’s Anuroop Dasgupta, who led the observing team on V960 Mon.
The findings in these two young star systems provide new insight into the process of planet formation. The planet in HD 135344B shows the stage at which the disk is stable enough to allow a single large planet to sculpt a spiral around it, while the candidate in V960 Mon suggests the possibility of planet birth via rapid gravitational collapse.
With ERIS’s sharp infrared capabilities and the support of telescopes like ALMA, astronomers can now monitor the structure of gas and dust around young stars in greater detail. In the future, a new generation of giant telescopes such as the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which will be operational in the late 2020s, is expected to be able to detect smaller planets and measure their masses with high precision.
