The wind made of ultraviolet rays blowing from some stars is forever erasing the possibility that gaseous planets similar to those of our Solar System, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, could be born in a baby planetary system.
It is happening around a star located in the Orion nebula, about 1500 light years away, and the process will continue for about a million years.
The discovery, published in the journal Science, is due to research coordinated by the group of Olivier Berne', astrophysicist and planetary scientist from the French University of Toulouse and the French space agency CNRS.
The observations made with the James Webb space telescope of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian space agency CSA, and with the Alma radio telescope of the European Southern Observatory located in the Chilean Andes were fundamental in the discovery.
Ultraviolet rays generated by nearby stars are stripping gases from the disk destined to give rise to a future planetary system.
Usually, similar phenomena occur when protoplanetary disks, i.e. the disks of gas and dust from which planets will be born, are heated by X-rays or ultraviolet rays, which increase the temperature of the gas and cause it to escape from the system.
Based on the data from the telescopes, the authors of the research obtained a model of the protoplanetary disk observed in the Orion nebula, indicated with the acronym d203-506 and according to which the gas will be eliminated within a million years and, with it, the possibility that the future planetary system may have giant planets.
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