Many discs of gas and dust in which new planets are formed are much smaller than thought, according to a new study involving UCL’s Dr Paola Pinilla. The research team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to look at 73 protoplanetary discs in the Lupus region. They found that many young stars host modest discs of gas and dust, some as small as 1.2 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the sun). In the past decade astronomers have