Birth of a solar system

Observations by the ALMA telescope array in Chile show the young star PDS 70 surrounded by a dusty ring of debris. The bright dot just inside that ring is a disk of potentially moon-forming debris surrounding a young planet. ALMA/ESO, NAOJ AND NRAO, M. BENISTY ET AL

4+ billion years, our solar system looked like this one with a planet forming accreditation disk revolving around its parent star and a slightly older planet in the process of generating a moon of its own.

Planetary formation is a complicated, multilayered process.  Even with the influx of data on exoplanets, there are still only two known planets that are not yet fully formed.  Known as PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets, which were originally found by the Very Large Telescope, are some of the best objects we have to flesh out our planetary formation models. And now, one of them has been confirmed to have a moon-forming disk around it.

Addendum: 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile glimpsed a dusty disk of potentially moon-forming material around a baby exoplanet about 370 light-years from Earth. The Jupiter-like world is surrounded by enough material to make up to 2.5 Earth moons, researchers report online July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Observations of this system could offer new insight into how planets and moons are born around young stars.

ALMA observed two planets, dubbed PDS 70b and 70c, circling the star PDS 70 in July 2019. Unlike most other known exoplanets, these two Jupiter-like worlds are still forming — gobbling up material from the disk of gas and dust swirling around their star (SN: 7/2/18). During this formation process, planets are expected to wrap themselves in their own debris disks, which control how planets pack on material and form moons.

Science done right yet again.