Catching a glimpse of one of the most common and familiar minerals on Earth rarely merits a headline. Quartz is found in beach sands, building stones, geodes, and gem shops around the world. It’s melted to produce glass, refined for silicon microchips, and used in watches to keep time.

So what’s so special about the latest discovery from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope? Imagine quartz crystals that appear quite literally out of thin air. A mist of glittering grains so small that 10,000 could fit side-by-side across a human hair. Swarms of pointy, glassy nanoparticles racing through the sweltering atmosphere of a puffy gas giant exoplanet at thousands of miles per hour.

Webb’s unique ability to measure the extremely subtle effects of those crystals on starlight – and from a distance of more than seven million billion miles, no less – is providing critical information about the composition of exoplanet atmospheres and new insights into their weather.