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The nearby star Vega, featured in the 1997 movie Contact, appears to have a smooth disk devoid of giant planets for reasons we can⁘t explain
So there was some disappointment earlier this month when astronomers announced a baffling discovery about this star. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and its next-generation kin the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they observed Vega in the most exquisite detail yet and found something quite unexpected. The star, despite being about halfway through its one-billion-year lifetime, does not seem to have formed any large worlds. ⁘It was really surprising,⁘ says Kate Su of the University of Arizona and the Space Science Institute, who led the JWST observations. Instead, it has a supersmooth disk of sandlike dust around the star that, while it might yet be hiding smaller planets, doesn⁘t seem to have formed bulkier worlds such as Saturn and Jupiter. ⁘We really expected to see some giant planets,⁘ Su says. The research was presented in two papers that were initially posted on the preprint server arXiv.org: one has since been published in the Astronomical Journal, and the other will be published in the Astrophysical Journal .
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