The Ingredients For Planets Turned Up Astonishingly Early

A protoplanetary disc around the young star HL Tauri, 450 light years away, its rings carved by forming planets. The Portsmouth simulations suggest discs much like this one existed within 100 million years of the Big Bang (Credit : ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe's slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape.

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