A joint Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project to learn more about the dusty disk around the bright star Vega has found a surprising lack of planets, as evidenced by the disk and surrounding halo being filled with a snow of tiny particles.
In the 1997 movie "Contact," Jodie Foster's character Ellie Arroway is transported to Vega, where she finds a cloud of dust particles but no planets. In Carl Sagan's original 1985 novel, Vega is similarly devoid of planets but is surrounded by dusty rings of debris that might one day form planets. Just like in "Contact," the Hubble Space Telescope and the JWST have found no planets, but contrary to Sagan's story they have shown that Vega's dust disk is actually pretty featureless, with no distinct rings.
