A radio telescope has found evidence that planets might form at the same time as their stars, instead of much later as was previously thought. The telescope detected dark rings in the disk around a nascent star system. The rings could be the first evidence that a star and its planets are forming and evolving together, potentially upending current theories about planet formation and shedding light on the origin of our own solar system. The nascent star system is called IRS 63 and is about 470 light-years away in the Rho Ophiuchi star formation region. This region is the closest star-forming region to Earth, and its thick interstellar dust may form the spinning clumps that will eventually collapse into stars. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—a radio telescope array in Chile that is excellent at detecting early planet formation—a team led by astronomer Dominique Segura-Cox of the Max Planck …