February 19, 2025
On the day you were born, the universe was already ancient beyond measure — and yet, in all those billions of years, it had never once...
HH 30: A Star System with Planets Now Forming
Birthday · February 19, 2025
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APOD published February 19, 2025. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
How do stars and planets form? New clues have been found in the protoplanetary system Herbig-Haro 30 by the James Webb Space Telescope in concert with Hubble and the Earth-bound ALMA. The observations show, among other things, that large dust grains are more concentrated into a central disk where they can form planets. The featured image from Webb shows many attributes of the active HH-30 system. Jets of particles are being expelled vertically, shown in red, while a dark dust-rich disk is seen across the center, blocking the light from the star or stars still forming there. Blue-reflecting dust is seen in a parabolic arc above and below the central disk, although why a tail appears on the lower left is currently unknown. Studying how planets form in HH 30 can help astronomers better understand how planets in our own Solar System once formed, including our Earth.