An international team of more than 120 astronomers that planned and gathered the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the Orion Nebula has discovered new information about the dynamics of planet formation in an environment similar to the one in which our solar system formed.
In a study featured on the cover of the March 1 issue of Science, the researchers focused their attention on a protoplanetary disk around a young star about 1,350 light years from Earth and addressed longstanding questions about the influence that large, bright stars can exert on the formation of planets around smaller stars in their neighborhood.
The team, which included Rice astronomer Patrick Hartigan, analyzed infrared, submillimeter and optical observations from JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array of radio telescopes in Chile, and compared them with predictions from theoretical models. They showed a process known as photodissociation, where gas is heated, ionized and driven away by ultraviolet light, could remove gas rapidly enough to influence the formation of gas giant planets around young stars.
Hartigan is leading another JWST project that is investigating a highly-collimated supersonic jet from a protostar.