The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a breathtaking image of HH 30, a young star ejecting powerful jets of energy into space, illuminating the protoplanetary disk that may one day give rise to a new solar system.
HH 30 is a Herbig-Haro object—a glowing region of gas created when high-speed material from a protostar collides with surrounding matter, generating shockwaves.
Located 450 light-years away in the dark cloud LDN 1551 within the Taurus Molecular Cloud, HH 30 is helping astronomers explore how dust grains interact with massive jets to shape planetary formation. The researchers published their findings on Feb. 3 in The Astrophysical Journal.
“These grains are only one millionth of a metre across — about the size of a single bacterium,” the researchers wrote in a blog post accompanying the image. “While the large dust grains are concentrated in the densest parts of the disc, the small grains are much more widespread.”
Stars take tens of millions of years to form, evolving from dense, turbulent clouds of dust and gas into faintly glowing protostars before igniting into massive, fusion-powered spheres of plasma like our Sun.
Scientists believe planets form around young stars as dust and gas particles collide and clump together, gradually accumulating over millions of years until they take shape as fully formed worlds.
To examine HH 30’s edge-on disk—visible to JWST only from the side due to its vantage point near Earth—researchers combined infrared data from JWST with longer-wavelength observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Hubble Space Telescope. This approach allowed them to capture dust particles ranging from millimeter to micrometer scales.
The result is an extraordinarily detailed view of dust movement within the disk, revealing its migration and accumulation into a dense layer where planet formation begins. Surrounding this region are multiple layers of gas: one ejected by the star’s jet and others forming a broad, cone-shaped outflow, enveloped by a nebula that reflects the star’s light.
“Together, these data reveal HH 30 to be a dynamic place, where tiny dust grains and massive jets alike play a role in the formation of new planets,” the researchers wrote.
