James Webb Space Telescope discovers planets forming in space's most punishing environments

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James Webb Space Telescope finds exoplanets in extreme environments that could potentially be habitable.

James Webb Space Telescope discovers planets forming in space's most punishing environments : Read more

 

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Space.com reported, "However, the results, published May 20 in The Astrophysical Journal, show that even under these harsh ultraviolet conditions, protoplanetary disks — swirling rings of gas and dust where planets are born — can still survive and evolve."

Accretion discs are difficult to show dust and gas mass, thus total mass measured for example in earth masses in various reports. I would love to see this clearly documented. Using 1% dust and 99% gas mixture for a 1 solar mass star disc, we could have some 3300 earth masses originally in our solar system accretion disc. Other reports continue to disclose surprises in studies.

Tiny Disks Shed Light on Super-Earth Origins, Sky & Telescope 150(2):11, August 2025. "Two-thirds of the Lupus disks — most of them around low-mass stars — turn out to have radii smaller than 30 astronomical units (au), the radius of Neptune’s orbit. Some measure just 10 au across; the smallest would almost fit inside Earth’s orbit of 1 au. “We knew most of the disks would be small,” says Guerra-Alvarado, “but we didn’t expect the majority to be that small.”

Planet-forming disks lose gas faster than dust, new survey finds, https://phys.org/news/2025-06-planet-disks-gas-faster-survey.html