Dec 12, 2014 11:46 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A sun-like star in its adolescence is apparently in the midst of a swarm of spatial objects the size of Pluto.

According to a National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) press release, astronomers spotted the star, dubbed HD 107146, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope. The team published a study on their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

The debris around the star formed a disk and the tiny grains of dust, no larger than a millimeter, have grown in their concentrations toward the far reaches of the disk. The Pluto-like objects may be tiny planets causing the dust up.

"The dust in HD 107146 reveals this very interesting feature - it gets thicker in the very distant outer reaches of the star's disk," study lead author Luca Ricci, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in the release. "The surprising aspect is that this is the opposite of what we see in younger primordial disks where the dust is denser near the star.

"It is possible that we caught this particular debris disk at a stage in which Pluto-size planetesimals are forming right now in the outer disk while other Pluto-size bodies have already formed closer to the star."

The astronomer was working at the California Institute of Technology at the time of the observations. HD 107146 is believed to be about 90 light years from Earth toward the Coma Berenices constellation. The researchers said they will need more time with the ALMA telescope to observe the unique star further.

"This system offers us the chance to study an intriguing time around a young, Sun-like star," study co-author Stuartt Corder, ALMA deputy director, said in the release. "We are possibly looking back in time here, back to when the Sun was about 2 percent of its current age."

See Now: Covert Team Inside Newsweek Revealed as Key Players in False Human Trafficking Lawsuit