Somewhere in Ophiuchus, 480 light-years from here, a planet is being born — not in some distant epoch of cosmic history, but right now. In a disc of dust and gas surrounding a star that is itself barely formed, something is carving out its orbit. And for the first time, we can see the scar it leaves behind.
In early April 2026, ESA released the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest Picture of the Month: a side-by-side image of two protoplanetary discs, Tau 042021 and Oph 163131, captured in one of the rarest and most revealing orientations available to astronomers — edge-on. Instead of seeing the discs as flat, glowing rings foreshortened by distance, we’re looking at them from the side. The bright star at each disc’s center is partly obscured by its own band of dust, and the fine structure normally hidden in the glare becomes visible: plumes rising above and below the plane, jets firing perpendicular into space, and, in the case of Oph 163131, a gap.
That gap is the thing worth stopping for. Located in Oph 163131’s inner disc, it shows up in ALMA — the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array — as a ring-shaped clearing where millimeter-sized dust grains have been swept away. Stellar winds don’t do this. Radiation pressure doesn’t do this cleanly enough. The most probable explanation is that a planet has formed, or is actively forming, and its gravity is vacuuming out the material around it.
What Webb is seeing
The observations were made under Webb programme #2562, led by principal investigators F. Ménard and K. Stapelfeldt, using Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments. They were combined with visible-light data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and, for Oph 163131, millimeter-wavelength data from ALMA. Together, the three observatories reveal what no single telescope could: a layered picture of the disc from its finest floating dust to its densest, planet-forming midplane.
The colors in these images are not arbitrary. Red, orange, and green hues encode different dust grain sizes and molecular signatures — hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — distributed across the disc. By mapping where these molecules concentrate, researchers can begin to identify which zones already have the conditions for planetary assembly.
Tau 042021, in Taurus (~450 light-years away), looks young and dramatic: dramatic conical jets fire perpendicular to the disc plane, and the outflows spread wide above and below the star in vivid color. Oph 163131, in Ophiuchus (~480 light-years away), looks different — calmer, its star nestled within a yellow dust disc, with softer scattered lobes of purple above and below. It feels further along. More settled. And yet it has this gap.
Why edge-on discs matter
Protoplanetary discs are not rare — young stars form them routinely as the remnant cloud of gas and dust from which they coalesced flattens under rotation. But studying a disc that faces us flat-on means fighting the star’s glare across the entire inner region. When a disc tilts edge-on, the star’s light is partly blocked by the disc itself, and the vertical structure becomes accessible. You can see how dust is lofted upward by turbulence. You can trace where the midplane — the settling ground for planet-building — actually lies. And you can spot departures from symmetry: warps, gaps, and irregularities that tell you something is already happening inside.
This connects directly to what we understand about stellar birth itself. Discs like these are the final chapter of the process described in our Stellar Nurseries immersive article — the same collapsing gas clouds, the same angular momentum, the same gravitational interplay that produces stars, also leaves behind these spinning reservoirs. What happens in them, over the next few million years, determines whether a system ends up with rocky inner worlds, giant outer planets, or nothing much at all.
What comes next
These images are part of an ongoing program to catalog edge-on protoplanetary discs across nearby star-forming regions. Future observations at additional wavelengths may allow researchers to estimate whether the gap in Oph 163131’s disc is consistent with a planet of a specific mass range — potentially narrowing down what kind of world is forming there. Meanwhile, the geometry of Tau 042021 makes it an ideal target for studying disc winds and jet formation, the processes that eventually clear away leftover gas and leave behind whatever solid bodies have managed to coalesce.
Neither of these systems is exotic or distant. At 450 to 480 light-years, they are practically next door in galactic terms — close enough that Webb can resolve structure on scales comparable to the distance from our Sun to Neptune. That proximity is what makes images like this possible. And it is what makes them feel, in some hard-to-articulate way, personal.
The gap in Oph 163131 is 480 light-years away — but the physics inside it is the same physics that, some four and a half billion years ago, gave us everything.
