Remove the star's blinding light, and the silhouette emerges. The James Webb Space Telescope used a coronagraph, a special occulting mask that blocks the star, to see the faint glow of the accretion disk (a gas-and-dust cloud from which planets are assembled) around TW Hydrae. This star formation nursery is only 8 million years old, infancy by stellar standards, and lies 200 light-years away.

The disk presented two surprises. First: after precise brightness measurements, it turned out that its outer edge at 120 astronomical units (one au is the distance from Earth to the Sun) is not smooth but splits into two arms, like a flashlight beam passing through a double window. Second: the shadow, which Hubble Space Telescope spotted back in 2005, behaved unexpectedly. Instead of smoothly rotating around the ring, it warped and settled into a position astronomers had seen before 2016. Such behavior cannot be explained by simple rotation — meaning the disk itself is warped or something hidden inside distorts the shadow.

Shadows and warps are clues for discovering planets. No direct images of exoplanet giants have been found yet, but the lack of detections sets an upper limit: any companions there are lighter than 0.4 Jupiter masses and lie beyond 60 au. Perhaps the architects of this theater are tiny worlds in dusty cocoons, which Webb's next instrument, working in thermal light, will be able to see.