Look up in the night sky during winter months and you can easily spot three bright stars arranged in a short line. This is the belt of Orion, the Hunter. Just below the belt, 1,600 light-years away from us, is a cloud of gas and dust visible in small telescopes under dark skies. Embedded in that cloud, called Orion's Nebula, are several clusters of star formation, including one called the Trapezium.

The bright stars of the Trapezium illuminate the gas and dust of the nebula, as seen in many popular astronomy pictures.

It is a chaotic place, the Trapezium. Huge stars are born and die rapidly, zapping the region with intense radiation, tossing their weight around and gravitationally booting smaller stars to kingdom come. No one ever thought it would be much of a place to conceive planets.

Least of all John Bally, a star-formation expert at the University of Colorado. Some of the foundation for Boss' theory is based on work done by Bally and his colleagues, Dave Hollenbach at NASA's Ames Research Center and Doug Johnstone, now with the Hertzberg Institute for Astrophysics in British Columbia.

"The gas giant planets must either form fast -- by a process such as Boss's gravitational disk instability -- or such planets will turn out to be relatively rare," Bally told SPACE.com.

Importantly, Bally has shown that up to 90 percent of all stars are born in Orion-like environments. If our Sun was not created in Orion, then it is exceptional for having a birthplace in the sort of calmer location where only 10 percent of stars come from. And if giant planet formation is difficult in Orion, then solar systems like ours will be rare.

Our Sun, Bally says, could certainly have been among the stars booted out of Orion. This scattering process was detailed recently by other researchers, though there is little hope of determining our birthplace any time soon, they say.

While Bally and others have viewed Orion as a hostile place, Alan Boss uses the Orion radiation to his advantage.

Like all planet-formation theorists, Boss wondered why Jupiter and Saturn are mostly gas while Neptune and Uranus have more of their mass tied up in rock and ice. If the solar system began its existence in Orion, he figured radiation could have stripped the gas from the outer planets as they developed, leaving behind the ice and rock that had served as the core of the protoplanet.

In fact, Boss says, the problem for the disk instability mechanism would not be a lack of time to form a planet, as Bally has suggested, but rather having enough time for the UV radiation to then strip most of the gas from the outer planets.

If Boss is right, the standard model will undergo a radical change. However, he cautions that the new approach is by no means definitive, and observational tests cannot be readily envisioned.

"If people accept this wild and new idea, then it would be a paradigm shift," Boss said. "But the majority of scientists aren't aware of it, and those that are have reservations."

One of them is Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"The thing we've learned in the last couple years is that the standard model cannot work," Levison said. "I applaud Alan for trying to think in a new direction. I happen to think it's not right. But it's ideas like this that the science needs to evolve to the right answer."