Then these objects collide and merge with each other creating large celestial objects like the one that serves as our home in the Solar System, which emerged about 4.5 billion years ago . Astronomers had already located the disks of stellar gas and dust – the "seeds" of the planets – but not the intermediate states.
Until now, because a group of astronomers from the British universities of St Andrews and Manchester has just announced that they have managed to detect a belt of rocks – or "pebbles ", as these scientists call them – around the star DG Tauri, located at 450 light years and relatively young (he was born 2.5 million years ago).
The discovery was made possible thanks to the precision of the e-MERLIN network of radio telescopes, spread across Great Britain and connected by high-speed fiber optics. Analysis of the data collected by these powerful instruments has made it possible to locate rock fragments of at least one centimeter in size. Furthermore, the e-MERLIN radio telescopes are expected to quadruple their resolution, which is likely to multiply these types of findings.
