Astronomers may have captured the best view yet of matter colliding with the surface of a young star, findings that may shed light on what the sun looked like in its youth.

Newborn stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust from which planets, asteroids, comets and moons are born. The star’s magnetic field connects the star with this protoplanetary disk, “funneling material from the disk onto the star,” study lead author Catherine Espaillat, an astrophysicist at Boston University, told Space.com.