This is an artist’s impression of a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk in which planets are forming.
An international team of astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to provide the first observation of water and other molecules in the highly irradiated inner, terrestrial-planet forming regions of a disk in one of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. These results suggest that the conditions for rocky-planet formation, typically found in the disks of low-mass star-forming regions, can also occur in massive-star-forming regions and possibly a broader range of environments than previously thought.
Credits
Illustration
ESO
