New Delhi: The James Webb Space Telescope has peered into a circumstellar disk for the first time. The disk is surrounding a large exoplanet designated as CT Cha b, with the host star around 625 lightyears from the Earth. CT Cha b is at a distance of about 496 astronomical units (AU) from its host star, with a single AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The star is only two million years old, and is still growing from the infalling disk of gas and dust. The circumstellar disk is rich in water but contains hardly any carbon, while the circumplanetary disk is rich in carbon.

The system reveals the complex chemistry at work in a system that is less than two million years old. Webb has been able to spot a number of carbon-rich molecules in the circumplanetary disk, including

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