On Wednesday, the James Webb Space Telescope
released its most recent image of celestial majesty, an ethereal hourglass of
orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its centre.
According to NASA and the European Space Agency, the
colourful clouds are only visible in infrared light and had never been seen
before being captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).
Ejections from the protostar within the dark cloud
L152. (NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale, A. Pagan,
and A. Koekemoer (STScI))
The edge of a rotating disc of gas at the
hourglass's neck obscures the very young star known as protostar L1527.
However, light spills out from the disk's top and
bottom, illuminating the hourglass-shaped clouds.
The clouds are created by material ejected from the
star colliding with surrounding matter, the statement said. The dust is
thinnest in the blue sections and thickest in the orange parts, it added.
The protostar, which is just 100,000 years old and
at the earliest stage of star formation, is not yet able to generate its own
energy.
The surrounding black disk, which is around the size
of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually
reaches "the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin," the statement
said.
Ejections from the protostar have cleared out
cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this
infrared view. (NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale, A.
Pagan, and A. Koekemoer (STScI))
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"Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a
window into what our Sun and Solar System looked like in their infancy,"
it added.
The protostar is located in the Taurus molecular
cloud, a stellar nursery home to hundreds of nearly formed stars around 430
light years from Earth.
Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful
space telescope ever built and has already unleashed a raft of unprecedented
data as well as stunning images.
Scientists are hopeful it will herald a new era of
discovery.
One of the main goals for the US$10-billion
telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main research focus is
on exoplanets, planets outside Earth's Solar System.
Reference: Agence France-Presse
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