Protoplanetary Disk (Artist’s Concept)

This is an artist’s impression of a young star surrounded by a disk of gas and dust. An international team of astronomers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to study the disk around a young and very low-mass star known as ISO-ChaI 147. The results reveal the richest hydrocarbon chemistry seen to date in a protoplanetary disk.

The science team explored the region around ISO-ChaI 147, a very low-mass star of 0.11 solar masses. They found that the gas in the planet-forming region of the star is rich in carbon. This could mean that the building blocks for planets may lack carbon because all of the carbon-containing chemicals have evaporated and been lost into the surrounding gas. As a result, any rocky planets that form might be carbon-poor.