circumstellar

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, the team obtained images from such a nascent planetary system -- also known as a circumstellar disk -- in the process of actively dispersing its gas into surrounding space.

At the heart of this discovery is the observation of T Cha, a young star -- relative to the sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old -- enveloped by an eroding circumstellar disk notable for a vast dust gap, spanning approximately 30 astronomical units, or au, with one au being the average distance between the Earth and the sun.

Those early findings transformed research efforts focused on understanding gas dispersal from circumstellar disks.

This marks where the supernova blast wave is ramming into surrounding circumstellar material.

The dust in the circumstellar material is too cool to be detected directly at near-infrared wavelengths, but lights up in the mid-infrared.