Baby 'failed star' has unusually rich planet-forming disk, James Webb Space Telescope finds

Infrared image of the center of the Orion Nebula taken with the NIRCam instrument on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope with inserts marking protoplanetary disks around failed star brown dwarfs.

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have spotted the most chemically rich disk ever observed around a brown dwarf, a cool, faint object sometimes dubbed a "failed star."

The finding comes from Cha Hα 1, a young brown dwarf encircled by a swirling disk of gas and dust where planets may one day take shape.