In a new study, this team explored the region around a very low-mass star known as ISO-ChaI 147, a 1 to 2 million-year-old star that weighs just 0.11 times as much as the Sun. The spectrum revealed by Webb’s MIRI shows the richest hydrocarbon chemistry seen to date in a protoplanetary disk – a total … Read more
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin … Read more
Beta Pictoris, a young planetary system located just 63 light-years away, continues to intrigue scientists even after decades of in-depth study. It possesses the first dust disk imaged around another star — a disk of debris produced by collisions between asteroids, comets, and planetesimals. Observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revealed a second debris disk … Read more
An international team of astronomers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to provide the first observation of water and other molecules in the highly irradiated inner, rocky-planet-forming regions of a disk in one of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. These results suggest that the conditions for terrestrial planet formation can occur in … Read more