News Planetary Science

The Webb telescope’s peek into a stellar nursery finds baby planets too

Images of six Jupiter-sized worlds reveal new clues into how planets and stars form

Gas and dust swirl, and stars twinkle, in an image of a stellar nursery. Some of the starlike objects captured in this image are baby planets, researchers say.

Gas and dust swirl in the young star cluster NGC1333, a stellar nursery where objects including stars, planets and brown dwarfs are born.

ESA, Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana

By Adam Mann

A distant stellar nursery holds a clutch of newborn Jupiter-sized worlds, the tiniest of which is surrounded by a dusty disk that might someday give rise to moons.