An international team of researchers, including those from the University of Michigan, have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to witness the birth of planets around the young star system PDS 70.

PDS 70, located 370 light years away, is about 5 million years old and is one of the most extensively studied young stellar systems. It is the only known protoplanetary disk system where multiple planets have been detected within the disk from which they are forming.

This system allows scientists to observe planet formation and evolution in their early stages. In PDS 70, a disk of gas and dust surrounds the star with a big gap in the middle where two planets, PDS 70 b and PDS 70 c, form. This gap acts as a planetary construction zone, where the new worlds gather material to grow.

How fast can solar systems orbit our Milky Way Galaxy? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers confirmed the existence of a star and exoplanet companion orbiting within the Milky Way’s galactic bulge that could be the fastest orbiting exoplanet system ever found. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems throughout the Milky Way and potentially beyond.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from a 2011 study published in The Astrophysical Journal comprised of some of the same team that used the microlensing method to identify the existence of two objects orbiting near the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, which is a region containing a high-density number of stars. At the time, those researchers hypothesized the objects were either a gas giant with an exomoon or a fast-moving exoplanetary system. The researchers on this recent study deduced that the objects consisted of a star approximately 20 percent the size of our Sun and an exoplanet approximately 30 times the size of Earth.

But the surprise was finding out the pair’s speed by comparing their 2011 location to its 2021 location, which the team estimated is traveling at approximately 600 kilometers per second (372 miles per second), or approximately 2.1 kilometers per hour (1.3 million miles per hour). At this speed, the objects will leave the Milky Way millions of years from now since it surpasses our galaxy’s escape velocity. For context, our solar system is orbiting our Milky Way at approximately 828,000 kilometers per hour (515,000 miles per hour).

Star formation begins in the molecular cloud where each dense core is initially in a balance between self-gravity, which tends to compress the object, and both gas pressure and magnetic pressure, which tend to inflate it.

Since the mass of the Milky Way galaxy is about 10¹¹ M_⊙ and its age is about 10¹⁰ years, we can calculate that at present, new stars are forming in the molecular cloud of the Milky Way at a rate of about three M_⊙ per year.

Related: Astronomer Witnessed a Star System Being Born.