A team of international astronomers led by University of Galway have discovered the likely site of new planet being formed.
They think it's a gas giant, a few times bigger than Jupiter.
The team captured spectacular images around a distant young star for the first time, using one of the most advanced telescopes on the planet.
That's the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, located in Chile.
They discovered an exceptionally structured disk around a nearby star, 430 light years away from Earth.
While the disk itself is bigger than our entire solar system, it's so far away it can only be observed at a scale comparable to looking at a pint glass in Galway from Tuam.
Finding potentially planet forming disks around nearby stars isn't necessarily unusual - but this one represents the "perfect storm" for eventual planet formation based on prediction models.
The team says detections like this bring us closer to understanding how planets are formed, and how our own solar system might have formed in the distant past.
