Aditya M. Arabhavi

When a chef prepares a dish, not only the proportions of ingredients matter but also their total amount. Two pies with the same sugar-to-flour ratio but made from different batch sizes will turn out differently. So it is with disks around young stars: carbon and oxygen are the key 'spices,' and their absolute amounts change the look of the cosmic 'kitchen' no less than their ratio.

A disk of gas and dust spins around the young star HV Tau C, nearly edge-on to us. The James Webb Space Telescope examined its spectrum and detected the glow of hot molecular hydrogen (H₂). This revealed a wide, bipolar wind blasting from the inner regions far beyond the disk.