For the first time, scientists have caught sight of planets in the hot, messy act of being born.

Astronomers using the Large Binocular Telescope and the Magellan Adaptive Optics System on Earth have discovered what appears to be at least one planet (called LkCa 15b) about the size of Jupiter or Saturn forming in orbit around its sunlike star.

The star system, called LkCa 15, could actually play host to multiple worlds still in the process of forming, according to a new study detailing the findings in the journal Nature.

By learning more about the young star system, scientists might be able to answer some long-unanswered questions about how planets form, including the origins of Earth.

"We see two planets, there might be a third one," Stephanie Sallum, co-author of the new study and an astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona, told Mashable in an interview.

Mysteries of planet formation

Planetary scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how planets form in the first place.

While this solar system is only one example of a forming alien star system, observing it could get scientists well on the way toward figuring out answers to some of the cosmic mysteries regarding planet formation.

For example, scientists now know that at least for this system, the Jupiter-sized LkCa 15b is "moderately old," astronomer Adam Kraus, a scientist unaffiliated with the study who has observed the LkCa 15 system, told Mashable via email.

This means that the planet started forming when the system was less than five million years old, but more than hundreds of thousands of years old.

This finding could help scientists learn more about the ages of other forming systems in the future.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that planet formation is a messy business — you don't instantly take a disk of gas and dust and turn it into a Jupiter," Kraus said.

"There's a finite time where you're assembling the planet, and you have blobs of material that are condensing and interacting. There's no guarantee those blobs will necessarily even turn into planets."

Gravitational wells help these planets form

The LkCa 15 system is about 450 light-years from Earth, and it looks pretty alien. All of the planets observed in this star system have a mass close to that of Jupiter, Sallum said.

The young, sunlike star is surrounded by a huge field of gas and dust, with the possible planets forming in a gap that is the size of our solar system, located between the star and its protoplanetary disk of debris.

"We see these gaps in the disks where planets form. So one idea has been that you could clear a gap in a disk like that by having a planet sweeping out material as it orbits the star," Sallum said.

"Something similar to that probably could have happened in our solar system's history."

Sallum and her colleagues observed LkCa 15 and its planets over the course of about six years. In that time, they used a technique called hydrogen-alpha detection. This allowed them to see the light emitted as gas falls into the gravity well of a still-forming planet and heats up to about 17,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

A composite image showing the LkCa 15 system. Image: Steph Sallum

"Pretty much the only way to heat gas up that much is to drop it into a fairly deep gravitational potential well, such as by having it fall onto a planet," Kraus wrote.

"Their discovery of this light demonstrates that there really is a planet there that has already condensed into something resembling Jupiter or Saturn."

Sallum knows that the planets in the LkCa 15 system are growing because the research team actually saw gas falling onto the world, but she hopes that, with further observations, scientists will be able to learn more about how exactly that process works.