James Webb Space Telescope studies dusty 'pancakes' feeding baby stars and birthing planets

A dark brown ring with white smoke billowing from it in a conical shape.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have gained a more detailed picture of the turbulent "pancakes" of gas and dust surrounding young stars, feeding them and facilitating their growth before birthing planets.

JWST gathered new details about the "winds of change" flows of gas that blow through these protoplanetary disks, carving out their shapes. In the process of doing this, the powerful space telescope saw evidence for a long-hypothesized mechanism that allows a young star to gather the material from the disk that it needs to grow.