The giant disk is spectacular. The newborn planet is remarkable. Neither is the real star of this picture. Around the young star PDS 70, a vast planet-forming disk has already been carved open by two giant worlds. On the right, just inside that ring, sits PDS 70c — a Jupiter-sized planet still gathering mass. But look closer. The faint, fuzzy glow wrapped around that planet is something never clearly seen before: a dusty disk of its own, a circumplanetary nursery where moons may be taking shape. This is the first time astronomers have unambiguously captured a moon-forming disk around an exoplanet. ALMA’s 66 radio dishes, high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, resolved the compact dust around PDS 70c and showed it is separate from the star’s larger disk. The little disk is roughly the size of Earth’s orbit and appears to hold enough material to build about three Luna-sized moons — a future system not so different from Jupiter and its Galilean satellites. We are watching a solar system in the act of making both planets and moons at once. Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); M. Benisty et al.
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