It's not the big ring that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming ring around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, that’s being talked about the most. Although the planet PDS 70c is a newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to Jupiter. It's the fuzzy patch around the planet PDS 70c that's causing the commotion. That fuzzy patch is thought to be a dusty disk that is now forming into moons -- and that had never been seen before. The featured image was taken in 2021 by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) of 66 radio telescopes in the high Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Based on ALMA data, astronomers infer that the moon-forming exoplanetary disk has a radius similar to our Earth's orbit, and may one day form three or so Luna-sized moons -- not very different from our Jupiter's four.

verybody sees the Sun. Nobody's been there. Starting in 2018, though, NASA launched the robotic Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to investigate regions near to the Sun for the first time. The featured time-lapse video shows the view looking sideways from behind PSP's Sun shield in December during the closest approach of any human-made spacecraft to the Sun, looping down to only about five solar diameters above the Sun's hot surface. The PSP's Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) cameras took these images over seven hours, but they are digitally compressed here into about 5 seconds. The solar corona, including colliding coronal mass ejections (CMEs), is visible here in unprecedented detail, with stars passing far in the background. The Sun is not only Earth's dominant energy source, but its variable solar wind also compresses Earth's atmosphere, triggers auroras, affects power grids, and can even damage orbiting communication satellites.