Planets are born from dust. In a disk around a young star, tiny dust grains collide, stick together, and gradually grow like a snowball rolling down a hill. But there's a catch: the gas in the disk moves faster than the dust and drags on it, preventing it from clumping into large chunks.

For dust to stick together, there needs to be enough of it. Then the grains start to 'feel' each other and gather into dense clumps. This process is called streaming instability. Turbulence in the gas can scatter such clumps, but as it turns out, not all turbulence does.

For the first time, scientists simulated a disk with a magnetic field and accounted for turbulence arising naturally from the gas's rotation. They found that dust gathers into large structures — zonal flows, similar to the cloud bands on Jupiter. Inside these flows, dust accumulates and sticks together into planetesimals — the seeds of planets.

This means turbulence isn't always the enemy of planet formation. If it arises from the disk's magnetic field, even strong turbulence only slightly hinders dust from gathering into future planets.