The Webb telescope solves a 20-year-old planetary mystery raised by Hubble

How planets evolved into the diverse worlds we see in our own universe remains one of the most pressing questions for scientists explaining how we got here and where we are going.

Now, a group of scientists has used Webb Space Telescope data to solve a mystery raised by a veteran space telescope more than 20 years ago that has shaken up what planetary scientists knew about how the first worlds formed from the cosmic ether.

In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered what appeared to be… Oldest known planeta huge world about 13 billion years old. The discovery raised questions about how such worlds could be born when their host stars were similarly young and contained only small amounts of heavier elements, a crucial element in the formation of planets as we know them.

In the new research, the team used the Webb Telescope — a cutting-edge space observatory capable of observing some of the oldest detectable light — to study stars in a nearby galaxy that is similarly lacking in heavy elements. The team found that these stars have planet-forming disks, and these disks are older than those found around young stars in our galaxy.

“With Webb, we have a really strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we should rethink how planets form and early evolution in the young universe,” said Guido De Marchi, a researcher at the European Center for Space Research and Technology. The lead author of the study is at NASA He releases.

In the new study, published Writing in The Astrophysical Journal earlier this month, the team observed stars in NGC 346, a star-forming cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The stars ranged in mass from about 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 they looked at were still accumulating gas, and the stars appeared to have disks around them. This confirmed Hubble observations from the mid-2000s, which revealed stars tens of millions of years old that retained planet-forming disks, which were generally thought to dissipate after a few million years.

In short, the team wrote in their paper that the results “suggest that in a low-metallicity environment, circumstellar disks can survive much longer than previously thought.”

Researchers believe that discs can remain present for several reasons. One possibility is that the lack of heavy elements actually benefits the disks, allowing them to better withstand the pressure of the star’s radiation, which could cause them to quickly explode. Another possibility is that Sun-like stars form from large gas clouds, which take longer to dissipate simply because they are larger.

“With more matter around stars, accretion continues longer,” Elena Sabbi, chief scientist at the National Science Foundation’s Gemini Observatory, part of the foundation’s NOIRLab, said in the same release. “The disks take ten times longer to disappear. This has implications for how a planet is formed, and what kind of system structure you can have in these different environments. That’s very exciting.”

The team used the Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) instrument to examine stars spread across the Small Magellanic Cloud. Last year, a team of scientists used NIRSpec for vision Alluvial clouds On a nearby exoplanet. Earlier this year, the tool was used to detect the first so-called Einstein ZigZag In space. Unlike the spectrophotometers found in older space observatories, the Webb instrument NIRSpec can Monitoring 100 targets simultaneously, accelerating the agency’s data collection and detection rate.

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