Because the system is so young, only about 6 million years old, the central star is still encircled by a disk of gas and dust , like most young stars. But the planets have cleared out a large gap in this disk, stretching from about 1.9 billion to 3.8 billion miles away, and are circling the star in this gap.These kinds of gaps in the dust clouds surrounding young stars have been seen before, and exoplanets are often pointed to as the source of these gaps. As the planets orbit, their gravity sucks nearby material inward, eventually hoovering up all of the nearby dust and gas, creating a gap. Eventually, a planet will run out of material and stop growing. This is also how researchers think the planets in our own solar system formed. But in many systems, only the gaps are visible, and not the planets themselves.PDS 70 is direct confirmation of both planets and gaps in the same system, lending strong weight to astronomers’ theories of how planets form. Furthermore, the two planets are orbiting in a resonance, with the inner planet circling its star twice as often as the outer planet. Such resonances can cause the planets to migrate over time, and researchers suspect that this kind of resonance between Jupiter and Saturn shaped much of the solar system’s early history.