When stars are young, they're shrouded in wide, flattened circles of matter. Astronomers call these features "protoplanetary disks," because it's their dust and gas that bunches up into the balls that ultimately become planets. Researchers have long suspected that "protoplanets" — half-baked worlds within those disks — might carve wide gaps in the seas of loose material that telescopes might be able to spot.

Now, that theory seems confirmed, with two planets discovered in the gaps in a disk around PDS 70, a smallish star in the constellation Centaurus, located 370 light-years from Earth.

PDS 70 is a relatively new star in our galaxy, having formed some 6 million years ago. (For comparison, our sun is about 4.5 billion years old.) And the alien star is still surrounded by a disk that astronomers can spot through telescopes.

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Back in July 2018, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) spotted a huge planet, between four and 17 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting PDS 70 close to the inner edge of that gap. Astronomers named this planet PDS 70b. Now, in a new paper published Monday (June 3) in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists revealed that there's a second planet in that gap.

The newfound planet, PDS 70c, has a mass between one and 10 times that of Jupiter. This world orbits closer to the outer edge of the gap, at a distance similar to Neptune's 3.3 billion miles (5.3 billion km). PDS 70c orbits its star once for every two orbits of its larger, inner twin.

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