Arguably one of the most confusing aspects of our solar system is the fact that not every planet is a nice, solid rock like Earth. Some are literally made almost entirely of gas. You can’t quite “stop” anywhere on Jupiter unless you manage to fall through layers of gas and escape unrealistic pressures before heading towards the potentially rocky core of the orange-striped world. It’s not ideal.

Even sci-fi video game creators sometimes have trouble imagining what it would be like to wander through one of these worlds. The first thing I tried to do after gaining some freedom in the game was Star Field For Xbox, it’s about landing your ship in a Neptune simulation and seeing what happens. The game did not allow this. It goes without saying that the mystery of giant gas balls is also quite intriguing for scientists. And now that they have the incredibly powerful infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope, they mount the space instrument on the body.

Just last week, a team announced that they could get some updates on the dynamics of gas giant formation thanks to JWST. More specifically, researchers say they are starting to make progress in answering the question of how long gas giants need to form around their stars before all the gas around the stars is exhausted.

The team used JWST to investigate what is (somewhat confusingly) known as the “disk wind.” As you might guess, this isn’t actually about the wind. Rather, it refers to the process of gas escaping from the disk around the star. This “disk” will be filled with various types of material that could potentially form planets. Therefore, it is otherwise known as the “protoplanetary disk”.

“We knew these existed and that they could play an important role in the evolution of the disk,” Naman Bajaj, a researcher at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and lead author of the new analysis of the disk wind, told Space. com. “What we didn’t know was the underlying physics and how much mass was lost as a result. That’s the key to answering all our questions about the impact.”

Such a disk would also contain non-gaseous debris that could be understood as dust, which could eventually coalesce to form rocky planets. It is believed that the world was once formed this way.

“Given the name, I think it’s just because of its ‘slow’ speed,” Bajaj said. The disk wind the team studied moves at about 10-15 kilometers (6-9 miles) per second, he explains. Fast-moving gas structures are generally called “jets”. They can reach speeds of over 100 kilometers (62 miles) per second.

Although Bajaj and his colleagues did not offer a definitive, well-validated answer for how long it would take for gas planets to form before the gas in the protoplanetary disk was completely exhausted, they did offer a rough idea based on their calculations. “Given the mass of gas in this disk, and assuming the gas continues to escape at the constant rate we found (about one lunar mass per year), this would take about 100,000 years,” he calculated.

Yep, that seems like a long (long) time. But, as Bajaj emphasizes, this is an incredibly short period of time in astronomy terms: “The protoplanetary disk lives for about five to ten million years!”

How to find a blank disk?

The first step in solving the motion of the disk wind is to find the object of the disk wind. To find the wind disk object, of course you need to find the proto-planetary disk.

Our solar system would not be suitable for such an analysis because all our planets, including gaseous ones, are full. So it turned out that the disk wind team’s target was associated with a disk around a young, low-mass star called T Cha. Honestly, this is an extremely interesting star in its own right. It is known that there is a large dust gap in the disk of the bright object, which is located approximately 350 light-years away from Earth. This dust gap is exactly what it sounds like.

“These cavities are thought to be created by planets that consume all material in their path as they orbit the star,” Bajaj said. said.

Therefore, such a gap indicates that there are indeed planets beginning to develop around the star. And It’s old enough that these newly formed worlds have had time to eat some of the disk. “We also call this the transition phase,” Bajaj said. “This transitions from a proto-planetary disk to a more solar system-like structure.” Bajaj also explains that previous ground-based observations suggested the presence of neon in the disk, which shows how gas in the disk is slowly escaping. We’ll have more information about this soon.

So we had a perfect disc element. The next step was to start making some observations to see what was going on around T Cha.

fizzy nobility

Neon is a noble gas, a category of elements represented by atoms with completely filled outer electron shells or valence shells. Due to this property of the valence shell, these gases are quite unreactive. However, they can still lose one of these outer electrons if exposed to a high enough temperature. If this happens, the gas will become “ionized” or electrically charged.

Since electrons have a negative charge, the loss of one makes the previously neutral atom slightly more positive. Gaining an extra electron will make a previously neutral atom slightly more negative. But more importantly for astronomers, when ionization like this occurs somewhere in the universe, it leaves a signature that their equipment can track. This includes the James Webb Space Telescope.

And as Bajaj explains, the neon signature is specifically for disc wind tracking.

First, protoplanetary disks likely contain some gas. Light neon is one of them. “The abundance of the heavier noble gases is very low, so we won’t be able to see them,” Bajaj explained.

Second, ionization occurs differently for different elements. Sometimes a very high temperature is required to push an electron out of an atom; In other cases, electrons exit more easily and do so at lower temperatures.

“Helium, which is more abundant than all these [благородних газів]It requires a much higher temperature for ionization,” Bajaj said.

But neon, on the other hand, will eject an electron under more modest temperature requirements; so the team specifically looked for neon emission lines to see how gas evolved in the protoplanetary disk T Cha. In short, they found two.

“When we first saw the spectrum—my first week in graduate school—we saw both neon lines explode!” Bajaj added that one of these lines has never been seen near T Cha before. “By looking with JWST, we found that the neon was coming from very far away from the star.”

“I spent months trying to understand whether we could see the structure of neon emission from the images; It was very difficult,” Bajaj said. He explained that it took him about eight months to confirm with JWST images that the structure was indeed there.