James Webb Telescope Captures Wild Image of Newly Born Star
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is offering a stunning view of what our sun may have looked like billions of years ago, when it first formed.
The telescope recently captured an image of a protostar, dubbed HH 211, located 1,000 light-years away. As you can see, the newly forming star is still gathering mass, and thus surrounded in a dark cloud of cosmic dust.
However, the same star is also ejecting bright plumes of extremely hot, ionized gas. The colorized patches are what’s called Herbig-Haro objects and they form around newborn stars. The ionized gas from the new stars can collide with the older surrounding dust and gas, creating a shockwave. In this case, the innermost jet plumes have been measured at a velocity of 48 to 60 miles per second.
Other telescopes have imaged HH 211 before, but only given us a relatively fuzzy image. In contrast, the cutting-edge mirrors and infrared sensors on board the James Webb telescope managed to image the protostar in "unprecedented detail —roughly 5 to 10 times higher spatial resolution than any previous images of HH 211,” NASA says.
The space agency adds that the protostar “is no more than a few tens of thousands of years old” with a mass at about 8% of our own Sun. But over time, HH 211 is expected to “eventually grow into a star like the sun.”
The observations from the James Webb telescope also suggest HH 211 actually might differ from our sun in a key way. “Wiggles” in the inner jet plumes show symmetry, an indicator that HH 211 is forming into a binary star, NASA says.
The European Space Agency adds that HH 211 “is one of the youngest and nearest protostellar outflows” to our planet.
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