This is a James Webb Space Telescope image of NGC 346, a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way's nearest neighbors. Ten small, yellow circles overlaid on the image indicate the positions of the 10 stars surveyed in this study. /NASA
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has found planet-forming disks lived longer in early universe, NASA said on Monday.
In 2003, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star, almost as old as the universe. Such stars possess only small amounts of heavier elements that are the building blocks of planets.
This implied that some planet formation happened when the universe was very young, and those planets had time to form and grow big inside their primordial disks, even bigger than Jupiter, according to NASA.
To confirm Hubble's discovery, researchers used Webb to study stars in a nearby galaxy that, much like the early universe, lacks large amounts of heavy elements.
They found that not only do some stars there have planet-forming disks, but that those disks are longer-lived than those seen around young stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
"With Webb, we have a really strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the young universe," said study leader Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands.