Human teenagers are known for creating vast expanses of filth wherever they go. It’s apparently no different for HD 107146, a star scientists have likened to a younger version of our own Sun. Thanks to a swarm of Pluto-sized bodies around its outer reaches, observations have detected an unusually large concentration of space dust in the region.

“The dust in HD 107146 reveals this very interesting feature — it gets thicker in the very distant outer reaches of the star’s disk,” said Luca Ricci, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When stars form and evolve, what’s known as the “debris disk” evolves along with them. Very young stars tend to have a preponderance of dust due to the messiness of planet formation. Mature systems, like our own, have comparatively little dust because planetary formation has ceased. In the middle, though – what’s akin to a stars “teenage” years – some models predict that things will get a whole lot dustier. Those models correspond with Ricci’s findings, which observe a growing concentration of millimeter-sized dust particles at the edges of the debris disk.

The dust is believed to be the result of the formation of small, Pluto-sized planetary objects. Imagine a common area in your average middle school: As the younger, smaller kids mill about and form groups, in come the older, bigger kids, bouncing around and acting like jerks, scattering the groups. That’s essentially how these Pluto-sized objects are making such a mess of things.

“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,” said Ricci.

Dust aside, another observation hints at another, potentially more exciting possibility: Far from the star itself (about 2.5x the distance between the Sun and Neptune), there begins a “dip” in the debris disk that stretches for over a billion kilometers. Ricci and co. aren’t making any promises, but they believe it could maybe, possibly be the result of an Earth-sized planet forming. If true, it suggests that Earth-like planets could form at previously unheard of distances from their parent stars.

Stay tuned for this time next year when scientists begin speculating as to whether this yet-unknown planet could potentially sustain life.