Planets are formed from when clouds of dust circling a star start to clump together and coalesce into a planet. At the recent Signposts of Planets conference held at the Goddard Space Flight Center , astronomers released the first photo of what is likely a planet forming around a distant star . Because the star is many light years away, the gestating planet only shows up as a smudge in the photograph, so it’s hard to see its finer details, or of its surrounding dust cloud. In fact over 100 dust clouds have been found circling around far away stars, and many of them likely have planets hiding some were inside them too. Astronomers have been scrutinizing these dust clouds to better understand how planets form inside of them, but it’s hard to get much resolution on these tiny spots of light. Fortunately though, we have an ideal model right here in our own backyard; Saturn. Really, on the cosmic scale, it’s pretty much in our living rooms.