This finding marks the first time a planetary system has been identified at such an early stage in its formation and opens a window to the past of our own Solar System. The first kilometre-sized planetesimals in the Solar System, which grew to become planets such as Earth or Jupiter’s core, formed just after the condensation of these crystalline minerals. “We're really seeing these minerals at the same location in this extrasolar system as where we see them in asteroids in the Solar System,“ says co-author Logan Francis, a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. As van ‘t Hoff says, “this system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our Solar System." It suggests that HOPS-315 can be used to understand how our own Solar System formed.