In a cosmic first, astronomers have spotted the earliest signs of rocky planet formation around a young star. The discovery offers a rare vision of how Earth-like worlds may begin.

Astronomers first identified these minerals using the now-three-year-old James Webb Space Telescope. To see where exactly the signals were coming from, they studied the system with the ALAMA telescope, which is operated by the European Space Agency with international partners in Chile’s Atacama Desert.