JWST captures newborn star starting life in a dusty hourglass
(ORDO NEWS) — The James Webb Space Telescope on Wednesday unveiled its latest image of celestial majesty: an ethereal hourglass of orange-blue dust ejected from a newly forming star at its center.
The colorful clouds are just visible in infrared light and were never seen before being captured by the Webb Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), NASA and the European Space Agency said in a statement.
A very young star known as protostar L1527, hidden in the darkness by the edge of a rotating gas disk at the neck of an hourglass.
However, light pours from above and below the disk, illuminating the hourglass-shaped clouds.
Clouds are created by material ejected by a star as it collides with surrounding matter, the statement said. She added that the dust is thinnest in the blue areas and thickest in the orange areas.
A protostar that is only 100,000 years old and in the very early stages of star formation is not yet capable of generating its energy. own energy.
The surrounding black disk, roughly the size of our solar system, will feed the protostar with material until it reaches the “threshold for nuclear fusion to begin,” the statement said.
“Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our Sun and Solar System looked like as an infant,” he added.
The protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud, a stellar nursery for hundreds of near-formed stars about 430 light-years from Earth.
Webb, in operation since July, is the most powerful space telescope ever built. It has already provided a wealth of unparalleled data and stunning images.
Scientists hope that it will usher in a new era of discovery. .
One of the main goals of the $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. The other major area of research is exoplanets, planets outside of Earth’s solar system.
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