James Webb Telescope Watches Baby Star Forge Crystals and Blow Them Toward Comet Zones

Roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth, in the hazy glow of the Serpens Nebula, a young star is behaving like a tiny cosmic foundry. During regular bursts of activity, it heats the dust in its surrounding disk until it glows, rearranging ordinary space dust into glittering crystals—and then blasts them outward on powerful winds toward the frozen outskirts where comets are expected to form.

For the first time, astronomers say they have watched this entire sequence play out, from the moment the crystals are forged to their launch on what one scientist calls a “cosmic highway.”

A before-and-after look at a protostar in outburst

In a study published Jan. 21 in Nature, an international team led by Jeong‑Eun Lee of Seoul National University used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the young protostar EC 53 at two key moments in its life: during a quiet phase and during one of its periodic outbursts. By comparing the two, the team caught the star’s planet-forming disk in the act of transforming amorphous dust into crystalline silicates—minerals similar to those that make up much of Earth’s interior—and traced how those crystals are swept into large-scale outflows.

The findings offer the clearest evidence yet for how high-temperature crystals can end up frozen inside icy comets, and they provide a rare glimpse of processes that likely shaped the early solar system.

“We were able to precisely observe the same protostar in both its calm and outburst phases, allowing us to track what happened before and after a single event, unlike previous studies that compared different objects or unrelated observations,” Lee said in a statement released with the study. She said the work was possible only because of the James Webb Space Telescope’s sensitivity and ability to capture detailed spectra and images in the mid-infrared.

A young Sun-like star with a predictable rhythm

EC 53, also known as V371 Ser, is a young, Sun-like protostar still embedded in the gas and dust of the Serpens Main star-forming region. The star is surrounded by a thick, rotating disk of material—a protoplanetary disk—where planets, asteroids and comets are expected to emerge over the next few million years.

Unlike many newborn stars, EC 53 is a reliable performer. Its brightness rises and falls with a period of about 543 days—roughly 18 months—as material from the surrounding disk periodically rushes onto the star in accretion bursts. Each flare-up lasts about 100 days, dramatically heating the inner disk while driving energetic jets and winds.

That predictability allowed Lee’s team to time Webb’s observations to capture EC 53 in a relatively quiet state and again during a burst.

Webb catches dust turning to crystal

Using Webb’s Mid‑Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the astronomers obtained spectra—the detailed fingerprints of light—from the dusty disk during both phases. In the quiet phase, the mid-infrared spectrum was dominated by broad features from amorphous silicate dust, the glass-like material common in cold interstellar grains. There was little sign of more ordered, crystalline material.

When the team observed EC 53 during an accretion burst, the picture changed.

The disk’s mid-infrared brightness increased by about a factor of three, and sharp features appeared around 10 microns and at longer wavelengths, signaling the presence of crystalline silicates. By comparing those features to laboratory data, the researchers identified specific minerals: forsterite (a magnesium-rich form of olivine), enstatite (a type of pyroxene), and hints of quartz. One analysis indicates that forsterite accounts for roughly one-third of the crystalline silicate in the inner disk.

Crystalline silicates do not form in the frigid outer reaches of a young planetary system. They require temperatures higher than about 900 Kelvin (more than 600 degrees Celsius) to rearrange the internal structure of initially amorphous grains—a process known as thermal annealing. The fact that these features appeared only during the burst, and only in the hot inner region of the disk, indicates that the crystals are forged in place when EC 53 briefly turns up the heat.

“Even as a scientist, it is amazing to me that we can find specific silicates in space, including forsterite and enstatite near EC 53. These are common minerals on Earth,” said co-author Doug Johnstone of Canada’s National Research Council. “The main ingredient of our planet is silicate.”

A “nested outflow” that could ferry crystals outward

The team did more than simply detect the minerals. With MIRI’s imaging capabilities and additional near-infrared data from Webb’s NIRCam instrument, the researchers mapped how material is distributed around EC 53 during the burst.

Those images show a layered outflow structure emerging from the regions close to the star: a fast, narrow jet of atomic gas nested inside a broader, slower flow of molecular gas. This “nested outflow” pattern matches predictions of magnetohydrodynamic disk wind models, in which magnetic fields threading the disk fling gas—and any dust grains mixed with it—away from the disk’s surface.

“EC 53’s layered outflows may lift up these newly formed crystalline silicates and transfer them outward, like they’re on a cosmic highway,” Lee said.

Joel Green, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and another member of the team, said Webb’s ability to combine spectral and spatial information was crucial. “It’s incredibly impressive that Webb can not only show us so much, but also where everything is,” he said. “Our research team mapped how the crystals move throughout the system. We’ve effectively shown how the star creates and distributes these superfine particles, which are each significantly smaller than a grain of sand.”

Solving a comet mystery from our own solar system

The work addresses a puzzle that has lingered since scientists first examined primitive solar system material in detail. Spacecraft and ground-based telescopes have found crystalline silicates in comets, including those thought to have formed in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud—the icy reservoirs at the solar system’s edge. Yet those regions are so cold that such minerals cannot form there.

For decades, models proposed that crystals must be forged near the young Sun and then transported outward, either by turbulence, large-scale circulation in the disk or disk winds. Earlier observations—including a 2008 study of the young star EX Lupi with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope—hinted that outbursts could crystallize dust. But those observations lacked the sensitivity and spatial resolution to track where those crystals might go.

Webb’s view of EC 53 provides the strongest observational backing so far for the idea that hot inner-disk crystals can be lofted to comet-forming zones by magnetically driven winds and jets. The telescope cannot resolve individual dust grains far out in the disk, so the presence of crystals in the distant outskirts is inferred from the outflow structure and the need to explain crystalline material in comets generally. Still, the combination of before-and-after spectra and direct imaging of a crystal-carrying outflow is a significant step.

What comes next

The result also highlights the role of international collaboration. The James Webb Space Telescope is a partnership among NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Lee’s team includes researchers from South Korea, Canada, the United States and Europe, and South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has emphasized the discovery as an example of the country’s growing investment in basic research.

“This discovery shows how long-term experience can lead to scientific breakthroughs,” Lee said. She added that the group plans follow-up observations to test “how universal silicate crystallization and material transport are, and how they depend on different stages of stellar evolution.”

If EC 53 is representative of many young Sun-like stars, similar bursts and winds could be a common feature of planet formation throughout the galaxy. In that case, the same kind of crystalline grains now seen whirling away from a baby star in Serpens may once have traveled outward from our own proto‑Sun, eventually becoming part of the comets that bombarded the early Earth and the rocks far beneath our feet.

As Webb continues to monitor other newborn stars and their disks, astronomers say they hope to learn whether EC 53’s crystal-strewn highway is an exception or a rule—and just how typical our own solar system’s path to becoming a world of rock and ice really was.