Birth of a planet: An artist's conception of the HD113766 binary system. The brown material circling the central star depicts a huge belt of dust, more than 100 times as much as in our asteroid belt, or enough to build a Mars-sized planet. The material is in the early stages of planet formation, when dust grains clump together to form rocks, which collide to form larger rocky planetesimals. The white outer ring shows a concentration of icy dust also detected.

Credit: NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

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CHICAGO: Snuggled into a huge belt of warm dust, an Earth-like planet may be forming some 424 light years away.

At somewhere between 10 and 16 million years old, the planet's solar system is still in its "very young adolescence," but is at the perfect age for forming Earth-like planets, said lead researcher Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, USA.

The massive dust ring surrounding one of the system's two binary stars is smack in the middle of the system's 'habitable zone' where liquid water could one day exist on a rocky planet.

Massive dust ring

These types of dust belts rarely form around Sun-like stars and the presence of an outer belt of ice makes it all the more likely that water, and subsequently life, could one day reach the planet's surface, said Lisse.

The dust belt is also made up of rocky compounds similar to those that form Earth's crust and metal sulphides similar to the material found in our planet's core.

Right now, the planet in the system known as HD113766 is growing as dust grains clump together to form rocks and these rocks collide to form larger bodies, some as big as our own moon. There are no plans yet to give it a name.

"It's just the right stuff to be making an Earth," said Lisse. "It's exciting to think that this is happening."

Not that we will be around to see much of it. The images captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are over 400 years old, but that's barely a blink in the eye of the young planet. It will likely be about 100 million years before the planet is fully formed and – if our planet is anything to go by – about a billion years before any putative first signs of life, such as alien algae, could appear, Lisse said.

Gas-like planets

But the images captured have helped the astronomers understand more about how an Earth-like planet could form. While mathematical models can be created to extrapolate what will happen to this particular system, even more can be learned if astronomers continue to probe the universe for other Earth-like planets at various stages of development.

The next step in studying this particular system will be to try to capture more images of it to see if gas-like planets, such as our Jupiter and Saturn, have already formed and to get a more detailed look at the contents of the dust and ice belts.

Lisse's team's findings will be presented next week at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting in Florida and published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal.