The birth place of planets

Source: ESO/L. Calçada

This illustration shows a young star surrounded by a disk of gas and dust where planets are forming. Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time, detected water and other molecules in the inner, intensely lit regions of such a disk—where rocky planets like Earth could form—even in some of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. These findings suggest that the conditions needed for rocky planets may be more common than previously thought, extending beyond small star-forming regions to also include those with massive stars.