Astronomers have captured the earliest known stage of planet formation, detecting solid grains condensing in the disk around the infant star HOPS-315, about 1,300 light-years away in the Orion B molecular cloud. The finding, published in Nature on 16 July, marks the first direct glimpse of “time zero” — when rocky planets begin to take shape — outside our own solar system. Using infrared spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope and high-resolution images from the ALMA radio array in Chile, an international team led by Leiden Observatory’s Melissa McClure identified both silicon monoxide gas and crystalline silicate minerals inside the star’s inner disk, within roughly 2.2 AU of the protostar. The dual presence shows hot gas cooling and solidifying, the initial step toward building planetesimals. HOPS-315 is a Sun-like protostar only 100,000–200,000 years old, yet its surrounding gas disk appears massive enough to spawn a planetary system comparable to our own. Because the minerals are forming at a distance analogous to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, researchers say the system offers a laboratory for studying conditions that prevailed when the solar system emerged 4.6 billion years ago. The observations suggest that early mineral condensation is not unique to the solar system, strengthening the case that Earth-type planets could be common. Follow-up studies will survey additional protostars to determine how widespread such “time-zero” environments are and which factors govern the eventual birth of terrestrial worlds.