James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

NASA’s Webb Finds Planet-Forming Disks Lived Longer in Early Universe

A riddle wrapped in a 20-year-old Hubble mystery… Webb just confirmed a controversial finding of Hubble’s - there are planet-forming disks in the early universe that are longer-lived than they should be given the conditions in their environment. In 2003, Hubble found evidence of a massive planet in our galaxy from a long-ago time when stars only had small amounts of heavy elements like iron and carbon - the building blocks of planets. How could this planet grow so massive in these conditions? Webb recently took a look at a star-forming cluster (in the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud) which also has a relative lack of heavier elements, making it a close proxy, with similar conditions, to star clusters in the early universe - like the one Hubble observed in the early Milky Way. Webb's sensitive instruments can split up light into its components, unlocking the chemical make-up of whatever it is observing, in detail. Webb saw that the stars in cluster NGC 346 do have longer-live disks which allow their planets time to form and grow - despite the lack of heavier elements. And those disks are longer-lived than those seen around young stars in our Milky Way galaxy. How do these disks survive long enough to form massive planets? Maybe it takes longer for stars in clusters with fewer heavier elements to blow away its disk. Maybe the gas clouds that formed these stars are more massive, producing bigger disks that take longer to disperse - or some combination of these things. Read more: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-finds-planet-fo... Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA) Image Description: The center of the image contains arcs of orange and pink that form a boat-like shape. One end of these arcs points to the top right of the image, while the other end point toward the bottom left. Another plume of orange and pink expands from the center to the top left of the image. To the right of this plume is a large cluster of white stars. There are various other white stars and a few galaxies of different sizes spread throughout the image. Ten, small, yellow circles overlaid at various points across the image indicate the positions of the ten stars surveyed in this study. Image & Description by NASA