NASA scientists are seeing the beginnings of a new star within a spectacular hourglass, courtesy of an image captured by the James Webb Telescope.
On Wednesday, NASA released details of never-before-seen features of a protostar located within the dark cloud L1527. The Webb telescope’s near-infrared camera was pivotal in bringing this image to literal light, due to the fiery clouds in the Taurus star-forming region only being visible in infrared light.
Dr. Klaus Pontoppidan, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, told Newsweek that the image is opaque without infrared light—such as if photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Webb telescope, however, can penetrate through dust and like a thermal camera can see through fog.
“It’s amazing detail we have never seen before,” Pontoppidan said.
The protostar, as Pontoppidan described, is a star that is still in process of growing and sucking gas and not quite having reached its end mass. In this image, it is hidden from view within the “neck” of the hourglass.
The dark line across the middle of the neck is an edge-on protoplanetary disk. Light from above and below the disk illuminates cavities within the surrounding gas and dust.
NASA said the blue clouds are where dust is thinnest, while thicker layers of dust—or where less blue light is able to escape—create pockets of orange. Cavities are created when material “shoots away from the protostar” and collides with surrounding matter.
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The protostar’s distance is about 500 light-years from Earth, which Pontoppidan said seems far but is actually one of the nearest young stars and about the average distance young systems form.
He said it’s not all much unlike what the sun and the solar system itself looked like 4.6 billion years ago.
This is a class 0 protostar, the earliest stage of star formation, and is estimated to be about 100,000 years old. It “sounds like a lot but it’s almost nothing in astronomy,” Pontoppidan said.
Its existence has been known…
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