In the furnace of star formation, the heat reaches 900 degrees Celsius, like a glowing blast furnace. It is in this hellish heat that cosmic crystals are born. Astronomers have for the first time caught the moment when crystalline dust appears right during an accretion flare (when the star gobbles up surrounding gas) at the very young star EC 53, still cocooned in dense gas. Using JWST, they compared infrared spectra, thermal rainbows, in quiet and flaring states. The first showed no trace of crystals. The second revealed clear peaks of forsterite and enstatite.
The discovery clears up an old puzzle: how scorching crystals make it to the frigid outskirts of the disk and even into comets. The answer lies in the structure of the stellar exhaust. A narrow jet of hot plasma erupts from the interior, surrounded by slower-moving molecular winds. This setup, like a central pipe within a wide sheath, acts as an express conveyor belt: freshly forged grains are carried outward. While we haven't yet directly seen the dust grains in transit, all signs point to the stellar forge kicking off dust processing and transport at the earliest, most turbulent stage of a star's life.
The first crystals found in comets puzzled scientists: it was unclear how they reached the frigid outer disk. Now a mechanism has been found — rapid ejection from a young star’s 'furnace'.