James Webb Space Telescope makes 1st discovery of disappearing neon around newborn star

An artist's illustration of a planet-forming disk around a baby star. In the center of the disk, there's a white-yellow glow. The disk itself looks like a giant donut with rapidly swirling gas and dust.

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest the amount of ionized neon gas present in dusty, planet-forming disks can tell us how quickly planets must form before the disk itself disappears. 

Planets are believed to be born in disks of gas and dust that swirl around newborn stars. Astronomers have observed these disks before, but the entire planetary formation process takes hundreds of thousands — and even millions — of years to complete. That means we don't usually get to see the disks change on small timescales. Rather, the features just appear as snapshots frozen in time.