JWST reveals how massive stars' radiation stunts planet formation

In the stellar nursery of the Orion Nebula, 1,400 light-years away, humanity's most powerful space telescope has witnessed a quiet tragedy: a young planetary disk being slowly unmade before it can become a world. The James Webb Space Telescope has shown that intense ultraviolet radiation from massive neighboring stars strips away the raw material of planet formation at a rate of one Earth-mass of gas per year — a process so relentless that gas giants like Jupiter can never coalesce around smaller, gravitationally weaker stars. The finding reframes our solar system's existence not as ordinary,