Artist’s animation of the dust trap in IRS 48

This artist’s rendering shows the planet-forming disc around the IRS 48 star, also known as Oph-IRS 48. This disc includes a region in its southern part that traps millimetre-sized dust grains that can come together and grow into kilometre-sized objects like comets, asteroids and potentially even planets. This "dust trap" is also an ice reservoir, with layers of ice, rich in complex molecules, gathering around the dust grains. Heating from the IRS 48 star is able to sublimate the ice into gas, freeing the trapped molecules and making them detectable. The animation at the end shows two of the molecules detected in the IRS 48 system: methanol and dimethyl ether, the latter being the largest molecules yet identified in a planet-forming disc.