How planets evolved into the variety of worlds we see in our universe remains one of the most pressing questions for scientists unpacking how we got here and where we’re going.

Now, a team of scientists is using data from the Webb Space Telescope to solve a mystery raised by a veteran space telescope more than 20 years ago, shaking up what planetary scientists know. about how the earliest worlds were formed from the cosmic ether.

In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope noticed what seemed to be oldest known planeta very large world that reaches about 13 billion years old. The discovery raises questions about how such worlds are born when their host stars are both young, and contain only small amounts of heavier elements—an important component. in the formation of the planet as we know it.

In the new research, a team used the Webb telescope—a state-of-the-art observatory in space capable of observing some of the oldest visible light—to study the stars in nearby galaxies are similarly lacking in heavy elements. Those stars, the group found, have planet-forming disks, and the disks are older than those surrounding young stars in our own galaxy.

“With Webb, we have a strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we have to rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” Guido said. De Marchi, a researcher at the European Space Research and Technology Center and lead author of the study, in a NASA release.

In a new study, PUBLISHED in The Astrophysical Journal earlier this month, the team observed stars in NGC 346, a star-forming cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The stars range in mass from about 0.9 times the mass of our Sun to 1.8 times the mass of our host star.

The team found that even the oldest stars they looked at were accreting gas, and that the stars appeared to have disks around them. This confirms Hubble observations from the mid-2000s, which revealed stars tens of millions of years old that remain in planet-forming disks—which are generally thought to disappear after a few million years.

Overall, the team wrote in the paper that the findings “suggest that in a low-metallicity environment, circumstellar disks may live longer than previously thought.”

The researchers believe that the disks may remain due to a couple of reasons. One possibility is that the lack of heavy elements actually benefits the disks, allowing them to better withstand the radiation pressure of the star, which would otherwise easily obliterate them. Another possibility is that Sun-like stars form from massive clouds of gas, which take longer to dissipate simply because they are more massive.

“With more matter around the stars, accretion takes longer,” said Elena Sabbi, chief scientist at the National Science Foundation’s Gemini Observatory, part of the foundation’s NOIRLab, in the same release. “Disks take ten times longer to fade. This has implications for how you form a planet, and the kind of system architecture you can create in these different environments. It’s very exciting.”

The team used the Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to inspect the stars covered by the Small Magellanic Cloud. Last year, a group of scientists used NIRSpec to see green cloud a nearby exoplanet; earlier this year, the instrument was used to identify the first called Einstein Zig-Zag in space. Unlike the spectrographs of older space observatories, Webb’s NIRSpec can observing 100 targets simultaneously, speeding up the rate of data collection and, by proxy, discovery.

Looking at star-forming regions both old and young can help explain the origins of our own solar system, which is about 4.6 billion years old.