As the star burns and generates a stellar wind, the dust in the disk begins to interact and form into clumps.
These blocks attract more dust and turn into pebbles, then into rocks, and the gas helps these rocks stick to each other, as it grows and captures more and more material and cleans its orbit around the star.
This is the first stage of planetary evolution, called minor planets, according to Digitartlends.
There is another important component of planet growth, though: ice. In cold clouds of dust and gas, ice forms as a kind of sleet on dust grains.
These ice grains carry some of the key ingredients for a potentially habitable planet, such as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Here on Earth, some of these ingredients are thought to have been brought to our planet by icy comets, but in other systems, these ices might have been present during formation of the outer planets.
Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope peered into the cold, dark depths of a molecular cloud to search for these ices that might form the basis of future exoplanets.
Looking at a cloud of dust and gas called the first chameleon, they were able to identify ice made of water as well as other molecules such as ammonia and methane.
