Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2026

40 JULY-AUGUST 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING understood that these disks exist and that planets take shape within them. What they couldn’t explain was how the raw material gets there in the first place. Now, a new study led by Indrani Das of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) has found the missing piece: a distinct transition zone where chaotic, infalling gas gradually settles into the orderly ro- tation of a planet-forming disk. The team named it ENDTRANZ — the Envelope Disk Transition Zone — and detected it for the first time in an actual young stellar system using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub- millimeter Array (ALMA). This is how protoplanetary disks form E very planet — including every- one in the Solar System — was born inside a rotating disk of gas and dust swirling around a young star. Astronomers have long by ALMA Observatory Bárbara Ferreira