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A group of astronomers from around the world took some very rare photos of planets forming hundreds of light-years away.

Even though there have been photos of “protoplanetary discs” in the past, the process has never been shown in such detail.

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“In [earlier] pictures, the regions close to the star, where rocky planets form, are covered by only few pixels,” lead author Jacques Kluska, from KU Leuven in Belgium, said in a statement.

The photos show the cores of young stars, which are where planets start to form by gathering dust and gas. Dust particles stick together to make bigger rocks, some of which grow into whole planets made of rocks.

“We needed to visualize these details to be able to identify patterns that might betray planet formation and to characterize the properties of the disks,” Kluska said.

Researchers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile had to use a relatively new imaging method called infrared interferometry to take the photos.

The method doesn’t make a picture right away. Using mathematical models, the team was able to separate the light from the discs from the light coming from the star itself. This is similar to how the first photos of a black hole were made.

The level of detail in the new photos is amazing.

“Distinguishing details at the scale of the orbits of rocky planets like Earth or Jupiter (as you can see in the images) — a fraction of the Earth-Sun distance — is equivalent to being able to see a human on the Moon, or to distinguish a hair at a 10 km distance,” Jean-Philippe Berger, principal investigator from the Université Grenoble-Alpes, France, explained in the statement.

So what did they end up seeing in the new images? Brighter and darker spots of light could be a sign that “there could be instabilities in the disk that can lead to vortices where the disk accumulates grains of space dust that can grow and evolve into a planet,” according to Kluska.