It’s been a question wondered about through the ages — how did planets form? Where did they come from?

There have been numerous theories attempting to explain this phenomenon — the big-bang theory, a higher being’s creation — the list goes on and on. And yet another idea will be added to the list.

Scientists think they have finally cracked the mystery of planet formation.

They believe planets form around a star born in a violent supernova explosion. They have detected for the first time a swirling disk of debris from which planets could arise.

Scientists said the most recent findings should give more information as to how planetary systems form.

“It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It’s a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments,” said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When a massive star collapses, the inner core, which is about 10 percent of the original mass, is compressed into a dense object approximately 10 miles in diameter called a neutron star. The other 90 percent of the mass is ripped away in an explosion.

Neutron stars that rotate rapidly give off regular pulses of radiation, which is why they are called pulsars, Chakrabarty said.

Scientists theorized that some of the ejected material could have fallen back toward the pulsar and stabilized in a swirling mass of star debris, called a fallback disk, around the star.

Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, Chakrabarty and his colleagues found one of these fallback disks around a pulsar named 4U 0142+61 in the constellation Cassiopeia.

The researchers combined their data with observations from ground-based telescopes and concluded that the disk orbits the pulsar at a distance of about one million miles and contains roughly the same mass as 10 Earths, according to www.nationalgeographic.com.

While researchers did not directly see planets forming in the disk, they believe the building blocks are present, according to www.cnn.com.