Overview

• The protostar IRAS 04302+2247 in the Taurus region lies about 525 light-years away with a protoplanetary disk roughly 65 billion kilometers across.
• Webb’s edge-on perspective shows a thin dark dust lane and twin reflection nebulae that give the object its Butterfly Star nickname.
• Data from JWST’s NIRCam and MIRI combined with Hubble optical imaging map small-grain distributions and nearby clumps, jets, and outflows.
• The disk’s measured vertical thickness indicates grains have migrated toward the midplane and settled into a thin, dense layer conducive to planet formation.
• The observations were released as a Picture of the Month and were gathered under Webb GO program #2562, which studies four edge-on disks to track dust evolution.