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A guitar string only sounds at certain notes, when pressed at the frets. So it is with the gas-dust disk around a young star: it's shot through with standing waves, but only chosen oscillations survive. Where the wave crests, cosmic dust and hydrogen collect, and later exoplanets are born. Between the crests are troughs, where planets are almost absent.

Having checked hundreds of known systems, astronomers saw: the distance to the star indeed takes only a few values. The pattern was especially clear inside Earth's orbit — where no order was expected before. Telescopes like ALMA have already observed similar wave rings in the outer parts of disks, but it was thought they couldn't exist near the star itself. New data say otherwise: the music plays even at the doorstep, hiding in the star's glare.

Planetary systems turned out to be not chaotic, but composed like a musical score. This discovery will help to search for new worlds purposefully and better understand the architecture of distant galaxies. For now, however, we have only a statistical hint, not a direct observation — scientists are testing different methods to rule out error.

Original abstract

as written by the authors arXiv:2604.08428

More than one hundred years ago, physics has been revolutionized when people realized that electronic orbitals, or electromagnetic interactions in general, are quantized. Now, in this study, we are presenting evidence of quantization of planet orbits around stars. Confining a wave in spatial dimensions "quantizes" its wave number. Therefore, this study points to the evidence of the existence of long-range standing waves in the proto-planetary disks. Such waves, although being on a much larger scale of few tens of AU, have already been found by ALMA observation-so called ring-like structure. Now we see that it may exist within 1 AU, and may exert its effect on the existence and distribution of planets within this distance range to the host star. Careful analysis has been carried out to compare the results of different surveys.