"Here in our Universe, one thing we could have been certain of, even before we began to examine or even detect worlds beyond our own, is that the Universe does have a mechanism for creating planets and planetary systems in orbit around stars. We have some supremely strong evidence that indicates there must be a pathway for that to occur: the existence of Earth and the other planets orbiting our own Sun."
"we can learn an awful lot about the cosmic story that brings planets into existence. But even with all we learn from that, including the conditions under which stars can come to possess planets, we still have gaps in our understanding. In an ideal world, we'd have no gaps at all: we'd be able to trace the story of planet formation, step-by-step, from a pre-stellar cloud of material to a fully grown-up and evolved system of mature planets."
Planet formation proceeds from collapsing pre-stellar clouds that create protoplanetary disks around young stars, where solids coagulate into planetesimals and then planets. Cosmology and exoplanet studies together reveal conditions required for stars to host planets and how chemical enrichment enables rocky and gaseous worlds. The earliest, metal-free stars could not form planets; subsequent stellar generations produce heavier elements that permit planet formation. Directly observing complete planetary system formation is limited by long timescales, so targeted observations of transitional objects are required. The 2025 detection of WISPIT 2b provides the last observational link connecting pre-stellar conditions to mature planetary systems.
Read at Big Think
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