Scientists discover a giant “planet factory” beyond Jupiter

About 4.6 billion years ago, the young Sun was surrounded by a massive disk of gas and dust. Over time, tiny dust grains collided and stuck together, eventually forming larger rocky bodies called planetesimals, the building blocks of planets and asteroids. But scientists believe this process was far from simple. Different regions of the early Solar System likely evolved under very different conditions, and multiple stages of planet formation may have happened at the same time.