The Webb telescope’s peek into a stellar nursery finds baby planets too

A distant stellar nursery holds a clutch of newborn Jupiter-sized worlds, the tiniest of which is surrounded by a dusty disk that might someday give rise to moons. The detailed discovery, made thanks to the unparalleled sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, could provide new insights into star and planetary formation, researchers report in a study in press at The Astronomical Journal.

Stars arise from enormous clouds of gas and dust when pockets of material collapse under the influence of gravity. The same process can also create smaller nonstellar objects, such as giant planets and brown dwarfs, which lack the internal pressure to fuse hydrogen into helium in their bellies (SN: 7/24/17).

In the young star cluster NGC1333, located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, a team of astronomers found hundreds of newly formed starlike objects, including six infant worlds with masses between five and 15 times that of Jupiter. The dusty disk around the smallest world is exactly like the kind that circle baby stars and give rise to planetary systems. This dusty disk might one day turn into a pack of orbiting moons, says Adam Langeveld, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University.

With nothing smaller spotted, it’s possible that he and his colleagues have found the lightest such object that can form with a disk, at least in this particular cluster. And given the parallels between how stars and planets can form, “we’re really probing the limit of the star formation process,” he says.

Future work will use JWST to look at the chemical composition of the newborn worlds and the surrounding material, potentially helping to explain what kinds of objects can form under what circumstances in this environment.