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With novel, state-of-the-art instruments and methods, scientists have caught the image of a planet in the making for the first time, according to HNGN.

The planet in its formation stages is located in "a gap in the transition disc", or planetary "nursery, of the star LkCa15", the University of Arizona  reported. Even though the star is 450 light-years away from Earth, scientists could capture the fascinating planet in formation.

"No one has successfully and unambiguously detected a forming planet before," said Kate Follette, a former UA graduate student now doing postdoctoral work at Stanford University. "There have always been alternate explanations, but in this case we've taken a direct picture, and it's hard to dispute that."

Protoplanetary disks are created around young stars from debris that is left over from their formation. Planets are created in these discs and gather the dust and debris from them, unlike the material in the disc or "falling into the host star".

This phenomenon hence makes a gap in the disc inside which the planets are created, as the new research shows.

"The reason we selected this system is because it's built around a very young star that has material left over from the star-formation process," Follette said. "It's like a big doughnut. This system is special because it's one of a handful of disks that has a solar-system size gap in it. And one of the ways to create that gap is to have planets forming in there."

Hence, spell-binding processes such as planetary formation are formed thanks to instruments and techniques developed in the University of Arizona. New technology includes the Large Binocular Telescope  (the largest telescope in the world), and the Magellan Telescope  which has an "adaptive optics system".

"Results like this have only been made possible with the application of a lot of very advanced new technology to the business of imaging the stars," said professor Peter Tuthill of the University of Sydney, one of the study's co-authors, "and it's really great to see them yielding such impressive results."

The study was published in a recent edition of Nature.

YouTube/The University of Arizona