PLANETS can be spawned by the same process that makes stars, say astronomers who have discovered a developing planet floating alone in a stellar nursery. “It’s a planet but it has all the hallmarks of an embryonic star,” says Jane Greaves of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh (ROE).
Until recently, it was thought that planets could only build up, or “accrete”, from gas and dust swirling in a disc around a newborn star. But everything changed in 2000 with the discovery of isolated planets without parent stars in the Sigma Orionis star cluster. “Their existence strongly suggested there was…
