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A Pair of Fledgling Planets Directly Seen Growing Around a Young Star
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Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read NASA Webb Explores Effect of Strong Magnetic Fields on Star Formation
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Full image below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.
“A big question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been, if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars form in such clouds, why are so few stars born here?” said astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the principal investigators. “Now, for the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales.”
Detailed study of stars in this crowded, dusty region has been limited, but Webb’s advanced near-infrared instruments have allowed astronomers to see through the clouds to study young stars like never before.
“The extreme environment of the galactic center is a fascinating place to put star formation theories to the test, and the infrared capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provide the opportunity to build on past important observations from ground-based telescopes like ALMA and MeerKAT,” said Samuel Crowe, another principal investigator on the research, a senior undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a 2025 Rhodes Scholar.
Bally and Crowe each led a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Image A: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb)
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Image B: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb), Labeled
The star-forming region Sagittarius C, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is about 200 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. The spectral index at the lower left shows how color was assigned to the radio data to create the image. On the negative end, there is non-thermal emission, stimulated by electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines. On the positive side, thermal emission is coming from hot, ionized plasma. For Webb, color is assigned by shifting the infrared spectrum to visible light colors. The shortest infrared wavelengths are bluer, and the longer wavelengths appear more red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Using Infrared to Reveal Forming Stars
In Sagittarius C’s brightest cluster, the researchers confirmed the tentative finding from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) that two massive stars are forming there. Along with infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) mission, as well as the Herschel Space Observatory, they used Webb to determine that each of the massive protostars is already more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. Webb also revealed the bright outflows powered by each protostar.
Even more challenging is finding low-mass protostars, still shrouded in cocoons of cosmic dust. Researchers compared Webb’s data with ALMA’s past observations to identify five likely low-mass protostar candidates.
The team also identified 88 features that appear to be shocked hydrogen gas, where material being blasted out in jets from young stars impacts the surrounding gas cloud. Analysis of these features led to the discovery of a new star-forming cloud, distinct from the main Sagittarius C cloud, hosting at least two protostars powering their own jets.
“Outflows from forming stars in Sagittarius C have been hinted at in past observations, but this is the first time we’ve been able to confirm them in infrared light. It’s very exciting to see, because there is still a lot we don’t know about star formation, especially in the Central Molecular Zone, and it’s so important to how the universe works,” said Crowe.
Magnetic Fields and Star Formation
Webb’s 2023 image of Sagittarius C showed dozens of distinctive filaments in a region of hot hydrogen plasma surrounding the main star-forming cloud. New analysis by Bally and his team has led them to hypothesize that the filaments are shaped by magnetic fields, which have also been observed in the past by the ground-based observatories ALMA and MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope).
“The motion of gas swirling in the extreme tidal forces of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, can stretch and amplify the surrounding magnetic fields. Those fields, in turn, are shaping the plasma in Sagittarius C,” said Bally.
The researchers think that the magnetic forces in the galactic center may be strong enough to keep the plasma from spreading, instead confining it into the concentrated filaments seen in the Webb image. These strong magnetic fields may also resist the gravity that would typically cause dense clouds of gas and dust to collapse and forge stars, explaining Sagittarius C’s lower-than-expected star formation rate.
“This is an exciting area for future research, as the influence of strong magnetic fields, in the center of our galaxy or other galaxies, on stellar ecology has not been fully considered,” said Crowe.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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View/Download the science paper led by Crowe from the The Astrophysical Journal.
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Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Leah Ramsay – lramsay@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Explore This Section Exoplanets Home Exoplanets Overview Exoplanets Facts Types of Exoplanets Stars What is the Universe Search for Life The Big Questions Are We Alone? Can We Find Life? The Habitable Zone Why We Search Target Star Catalog Discoveries Discoveries Dashboard How We Find and Characterize Missions People Exoplanet Catalog Immersive The Exoplaneteers Exoplanet Travel Bureau 5 Ways to Find a Planet Strange New Worlds Universe of Monsters Galaxy of Horrors News Stories Blog Resources Get Involved Glossary Eyes on Exoplanets Exoplanet Watch More Multimedia ExEP This artist’s concept pictures the planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, as seen from close to the surface of one of them. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld The Discovery
Four rocky planets much smaller than Earth orbit Barnard’s Star, the next closest to ours after the three-star Alpha Centauri system. Barnard’s is the nearest single star.
Key Facts
Barnard’s Star, six light-years away, is notorious among astronomers for a history of false planet detections. But with the help of high-precision technology, the latest discovery — a family of four — appears to be solidly confirmed. The tiny size of the planets is also remarkable: Capturing evidence of small worlds at great distance is a tall order, even using state-of-the-art instruments and observational techniques.
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Watching for wobbles in the light from a star is one of the leading methods for detecting exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. This “radial velocity” technique tracks subtle shifts in the spectrum of starlight caused by the gravity of a planet pulling its star back and forth as the planet orbits. But tiny planets pose a major challenge: the smaller the planet, the smaller the pull. These four are each between about a fifth and a third as massive as Earth. Stars also are known to jitter and quake, creating background “noise” that potentially could swamp the comparatively quiet signals from smaller, orbiting worlds.
Astronomers measure the back-and-forth shifting of starlight in meters per second; in this case the radial velocity signals from all four planets amount to faint whispers — from 0.2 to 0.5 meters per second (a person walks at about 1 meter per second). But the noise from stellar activity is nearly 10 times larger at roughly 2 meters per second.
How to separate planet signals from stellar noise? The astronomers made detailed mathematical models of Barnard’s Star’s quakes and jitters, allowing them to recognize and remove those signals from the data collected from the star.
The new paper confirming the four tiny worlds — labeled b, c, d, and e — relies on data from MAROON-X, an “extreme precision” radial velocity instrument attached to the Gemini Telescope on the Maunakea mountaintop in Hawaii. It confirms the detection of the “b” planet, made with previous data from ESPRESSO, a radial velocity instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. And the new work reveals three new sibling planets in the same system.
Fun Facts
These planets orbit their red-dwarf star much too closely to be habitable. The closest planet’s “year” lasts a little more than two days; for the farthest planet, it’s is just shy of seven days. That likely makes them too hot to support life. Yet their detection bodes well in the search for life beyond Earth. Scientists say small, rocky planets like ours are probably the best places to look for evidence of life as we know it. But so far they’ve been the most difficult to detect and characterize. High-precision radial velocity measurements, combined with more sharply focused techniques for extracting data, could open new windows into habitable, potentially life-bearing worlds.
Barnard’s star was discovered in 1916 by Edward Emerson Barnard, a pioneering astrophotographer.
The Discoverers
An international team of scientists led by Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago published their paper on the discovery, “Four Sub-Earth Planets Orbiting Barnard’s Star from MAROON-X and ESPRESSO,” in the science journal, “The Astrophysical Journal Letters,” in March 2025. The planets were entered into the NASA Exoplanet Archive on March 13, 2025.
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Sols 4493-4494: Just Looking Around
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on March 25, 2025 — sol 4491, or Martian day 4,491 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 17:16:50 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at York University
Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 26, 2025
It’s my second shift of the week as the Environmental theme lead and keeper of the plan (a bit of a mouthful we shorten to ESTLK) and today started out feeling eerily similar to Monday. Once again, Curiosity is posing like a geologist, which means that once again we can’t unstow the arm and will be skipping contact science. The silver lining is that this means we have extra time to have a good look around.
The plan also looks similar to Monday’s — targeted remote sensing on the first sol before driving away, and then untargeted remote sensing on the next. On sol 4493 we start our remote sensing, almost as remote as we can get, with a suprahorizon movie looking for clouds in the south. A dust-devil survey rounds out the sol’s environmental observations, and then the geology theme group can get down to the serious business of looking at rocks. For Mastcam this means observing a group of bedrock targets all called “Observatory Trail” (one of which you can see in the middle of the image above), pointing out some interesting veins in “Point Loma,” and casting their gaze out toward “Black Butte” (which I could not think of a fun pun for…). ChemCam has a LIBS observation of “Cholla,” as well as two long-distance observations of the Texoli Butte and the boxwork structures. Our second sol is a little more restrained, as untargeted sols tend to be. But Curiosity will still have plenty of energy after a good rest. We’re taking advantage of that with an extra-long dust-devil movie. Even though we’re in our cloudy season, we still sometimes see dust lifting, and having that extra time to look out for it increases our chances of catching a wind gust or a dust devil in action. Alongside that we also have a Mastcam tau observation to keep an eye on the amount of dust in the atmosphere, and wrap up with a ChemCam AEGIS activity to autonomously choose a LIBS target.
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X-ray: NASA/CXC/Technion/N. Keshet et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss People often think about archaeology happening deep in jungles or inside ancient pyramids. However, a team of astronomers has shown that they can use stars and the remains they leave behind to conduct a special kind of archaeology in space.
Mining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the team of astronomers studied the relics that one star left behind after it exploded. This “supernova archaeology” uncovered important clues about a star that self-destructed – probably more than a million years ago.
Today, the system called GRO J1655-40 contains a black hole with nearly seven times the mass of the Sun and a star with about half as much mass. However, this was not always the case.
Originally GRO J1655-40 had two shining stars. The more massive of the two stars, however, burned through all of its nuclear fuel and then exploded in what astronomers call a supernova. The debris from the destroyed star then rained onto the companion star in orbit around it, as shown in the artist’s concept.
This artist’s impression shows the effects of the collapse and supernova explosion of a massive star. A black hole (right) was formed in the collapse and debris from the supernova explosion is raining down onto a companion star (left), polluting its atmosphere.CXC/SAO/M. Weiss With its outer layers expelled, including some striking its neighbor, the rest of the exploded star collapsed onto itself and formed the black hole that exists today. The separation between the black hole and its companion would have shrunk over time because of energy being lost from the system, mainly through the production of gravitational waves. When the separation became small enough, the black hole, with its strong gravitational pull, began pulling matter from its companion, wrenching back some of the material its exploded parent star originally deposited.
While most of this material sank into the black hole, a small amount of it fell into a disk that orbits around the black hole. Through the effects of powerful magnetic fields and friction in the disk, material is being sent out into interstellar space in the form of powerful winds.
This is where the X-ray archaeological hunt enters the story. Astronomers used Chandra to observe the GRO J1655-40 system in 2005 when it was particularly bright in X-rays. Chandra detected signatures of individual elements found in the black hole’s winds by getting detailed spectra – giving X-ray brightness at different wavelengths – embedded in the X-ray light. Some of these elements are highlighted in the spectrum shown in the inset.
The team of astronomers digging through the Chandra data were able to reconstruct key physical characteristics of the star that exploded from the clues imprinted in the X-ray light by comparing the spectra with computer models of stars that explode as supernovae. They discovered that, based on the amounts of 18 different elements in the wind, the long-gone star destroyed in the supernova was about 25 times the mass of the Sun, and was much richer in elements heavier than helium in comparison with the Sun.
This analysis paves the way for more supernova archaeology studies using other outbursts of double star systems.
A paper describing these results titled “Supernova Archaeology with X-Ray Binary Winds: The Case of GRO J1655−40” was published in The Astrophysical Journal in May 2024. The authors of this study are Noa Keshet (Technion — Israel Institute of Technology), Ehud Behar (Technion), and Timothy Kallman (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center).
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
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Visual Description
This release features an artist’s rendering of a supernova explosion, inset with a spectrum graph.
The artist’s illustration features a star and a black hole in a system called GRO J1655-40. Here, the black hole is represented by a black sphere to our upper right of center. The star is represented by a bright yellow sphere to our lower left of center. In this illustration, the artist captures the immensely powerful supernova as a black hole is created from the collapse of a massive star, with an intense burst of blurred beams radiating from the black sphere. The blurred beams of red, orange, and yellow light show debris from the supernova streaking across the entire image in rippling waves. These beams rain debris on the bright yellow star.
When astronomers used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe the system in 2005, they detected signatures of individual elements embedded in the X-ray light. Some of those elements are highlighted in the spectrum graph shown in the inset, positioned at our upper lefthand corner.
The graph’s vertical axis, on our left, indicates X-ray brightness from 0.0 up to 0.7 in intensity units. The horizontal axis, at the bottom of the graph, indicates Wavelength from 6 to 12 in units of Angstroms. On the graph, a tight zigzagging line begins near the top of the vertical axis, and slopes down toward the far end of the horizontal axis. The sharp dips show wavelengths where the light has been absorbed by different elements, decreasing the X-ray brightness. Some of the elements causing these dips have been labeled, including Silicon, Magnesium, Iron, Nickel, Neon, and Cobalt.
News Media Contact
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
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617-496-7998
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Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
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