With an image from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA finds clues outside the solar system that explain crystals born in fire and traveling toward the cold nasa-crystals-fire crystal For a long time, scientists have tried to figure out why comets far out in our solar system have crystalline silicates in them, especially since these minerals need high heat to grow and these “icy rocks” usually stay in the freezing Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Today, by peering deep into space, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided the first solid proof explaining how these situations occur.
A Cosmic Mystery Solved (take that, Agatha Christi)
The telescope proved for the first time that the scorching inner ring of gas and dust around a growing baby star is the exact spot where these crystals are made. Webb also found a powerful gust of wind that can blow these crystals all the way to the outer rim of that ring. In our own finished solar system, this would be like crystals forming in the space between the Sun and the Earth.
Webb’s sharp mid-infrared views of the baby star EC 53 also show that the strong gusts coming from the star’s disk are likely tossing these crystals into far-off spots, such as the freezing outer edges of the disk where comets might eventually form. “The layered winds from EC 53 might pick up these fresh crystals and carry them away as if they were on a cosmic highway,” said Jeong-Eun Lee, a professor at Seoul National University and the lead author of a new study in Nature. “Webb didn’t just show us the specific kinds of minerals in the dust near the star, but also where they were located both before and during an outburst.”
I’m on a Highway to… Space
The researchers used Webb’s MIRI tool to gather two very clear sets of light data so they could name the specific chemicals and molecules and see how they are built. After that, they made an exact map of where everything sits, looking at both the times EC 53 is “calm”—though still slowly snacking on its disk—and the times it gets more energetic during a burst.
A Predictable Baby Star Made of Crystal
This star has been watched by this group and others for a long time, and it follows a very steady pattern. (Many other baby stars have messy bursts that are hard to track, or their flare-ups go on for centuries.) Roughly every year and a half, EC 53 starts a loud, hundred-day growth spurt where it speeds up and swallows a ton of nearby gas and dust, while also spitting some of that material back out in strong streams. These big releases might toss some of the fresh crystals into the far edges of the star’s surrounding ring.
“Even with my background in science, I find it incredible that we can spot certain minerals in space, like forsterite and enstatite right by EC 53,” noted Doug Johnstone, who helped write the study and works as a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada. “These are types of rocks we see every day on Earth, since our own planet is mostly made of silicates.”
For a long time, studies have found these same crystals on comets in our own neighborhood and in the dusty rings around other stars, but nobody could figure out the way they moved so far out. Thanks to the new info from Webb, scientists have a much clearer idea of the way these events could happen.
“It is really amazing that Webb can show us so much while also pinpointing exactly where things are located,” noted Joel Green, a co-author and instrument scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “Our group tracked the way these crystals travel across the whole area. We have basically demonstrated how the star makes and spreads these tiny grains, which are way smaller than a single speck of sand.”
Information from Webb’s MIRI also gives a clear view of the star’s thin, fast-moving jets of hot gas at its poles, plus the slightly cooler and slower winds that start in the hottest, inner part of the disk feeding the star.