Caught on camera: The violent birth of an enormous new planet

It's a big baby, too — about twice the size of Jupiter

This composite shows a view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (left) and from the NACO system on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (right).
(Image credit: ESO/NASA/ESA/Ardila et al.)

Despite never having observed the phenomenon firsthand, scientists have a pretty good idea of how planets form. The dominant theory is that dust, gas, and other materials spewed from a newly formed star zip around a young solar system, smashing into one another chaotically. Eventually, a few objects start clumping together like cosmic dust bunnies, growing larger and more recognizable over time.

Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, a force called gravity molds these snowballing chunks of space rock into planets, like Jupiter, Neptune, and even our humble little Earth.

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Chris Gayomali is the science and technology editor for TheWeek.com. Previously, he was a tech reporter at TIME. His work has also appeared in Men's Journal, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among other places. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.