Webb Telescope Solves a 20-Year-Old Planetary Mystery Sparked by Hubble

How planets evolve into the diversity of worlds we see in our universe remains one of the most important questions for scientists about how we got here and where we’re going.

Now, a group of scientists has used Web Space Telescope data to solve a mystery raised by an experienced space telescope more than 20 years ago, shaking up what planetary scientists knew about how the first Earth took shape from the cosmic ether.

In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope detected what it was The oldest known planetA giant world clock is about 13 billion years old The discovery raised the question of how such worlds were born when their host stars were similarly young and contained only small amounts of heavy elements – a key component of planet formation as we know them.

In the new study, a team used the Webb Telescope — a state-of-the-art space observatory capable of observing some of the oldest detectable light — to study stars in a nearby galaxy that similarly lacks heavier elements. These stars, the team found, have planet-forming disks, and those disks are older than young stars in our own galaxy.

“With the Web, we have a really strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we have to rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” said Guido de Marchi, a researcher at the European Space Research and Technology Center. and lead author of a study at NASA release.

In a new study, published Earlier this month in The Astrophysical Journal, the team observed the star in NGC 346, a star-forming cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The star’s mass ranges from 0.9 times the mass of our Sun to 1.8 times the mass of our host star.

The team found that even the oldest stars are still accreting gas and appear to have disks around the stars. This confirmed Hubble’s observations from the mid-2000s, which revealed millions of years old stars that retained planet-forming disks — which were generally thought to dissipate after millions of years.

In summary, the team wrote in the paper that the results “prove that in a low metallicity environment, circular discs can survive longer than previously thought.”

Researchers believe that discs can stick around for a number of reasons. One possibility is that the lack of heavy material actually benefits the discs, allowing them to better withstand the star’s radiation pressure, which would otherwise blow them away quickly. Another possibility is that stars like the Sun form from large gas clouds, which take longer to dissipate because they are larger.

“With more matter around the star, the accretion lasts longer,” said Elena Sabbi, principal scientist at the National Science Foundation’s Gemini Observatory, part of the foundation’s NOIRLab, in the same release. “Discs take ten times longer to disappear. That has implications for how you form a planet and the kind of system architecture you can have in these different environments. It’s very exciting.”

The team inspected stars across the Small Magellanic Cloud using the Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument. Last year, a team of scientists used NIRSpec to see silent cloud on nearby exoplanets; Earlier this year, the instrument was used to detect the first so-called Einstein zig-zag Contrasted with old space observatory spectrographs in space, Webb’s NIRSpec can Targeting 100 targets simultaneously, speeds up the rate of data collection and, by proxy, discovery.

Looking at star-forming regions, both old and young, can help clarify the origins of our own solar system, which is about 4.6 billion years old.