Guess what, space fans? 🚀 The James Webb Space Telescope is at it again, blowing our minds with some cosmic revelations! NASA just announced that planet-forming disks lived longer in the early universe than we ever imagined. 🌌
Back in 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a massive planet orbiting a star nearly as old as the universe itself. 🤯 These ancient stars have only tiny amounts of heavy elements—the stuff planets are made of—so finding a giant planet there was a big surprise.
This hinted that planets started forming when the universe was super young, and these planets had plenty of time to grow, even bigger than Jupiter! 🌠
Fast forward to now, researchers used the Webb Telescope to peek at stars in a nearby galaxy that, like the early universe, doesn't have a lot of heavy elements. And guess what they found? Some of these stars not only have planet-forming disks, but these disks stick around longer than the ones we see around young stars in our own Milky Way. Talk about a cosmic throwback! 🔄
\"With Webb, we've got solid proof of what Hubble saw, and we must rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,\" said Guido De Marchi from the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands.
This epic discovery means the universe was cooking up planets way earlier, and possibly bigger, than we thought. Time to update those astronomy textbooks! 📚✨
Reference(s):
Webb finds planet-forming disks lived longer in early universe
cgtn.com
