Planets can differ from the swirling envelopes of gas and dust from which they are born, astronomers have found. The revelation seems to indicate that the planet formation model favored by scientists may be overly simple.

A team led by researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois made this discovery while observing a still-forming planet and the disk of natal material in which it sits.

The exoplanet at the heart of this research is PDS 70b, a gas giant with around three times the mass and width of Jupiter located 369 light-years away from us. PDS 70b orbits its star at around 20 times the distance between Earth and the sun, taking 119.2 Earth years to complete an orbit.

Just as we expect children to look like their parents, scientists have also expected planets to have similarities with the disks of matter around infant stars, called protoplanetary disks, from which they form and then sit within as they evolve.