Benoît Tabone

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 newborn star is like a kitchen mixer: it whips up the surrounding cloud, and splatters fly in all directions. Only instead of batter, it's gas and dust. Previously, astronomers had only seen gas jets, and dust was considered too fragile: the shock wave should shatter dust grains into atoms.