Jets of star stuff can be seen blazing from the newborn star’s poles and traveling through space at supersonic rates in the unusual image.
A newborn star’s supersonic outflow was photographed by NASA’s most powerful observatory, the James Webb Space observatory (JWST), providing a glimpse of how our Sun would have looked thousands of years ago.
A very young star’s poles can be seen shooting jets of star stuff into space at supersonic speeds in the incredibly uncommon photograph. Herbig-Haro objects are the brilliant areas that surround the young stars.
Herbig-Haro (HH) 211, the particular Herbig-Haro object visible in the image, is presently located in the constellation Perseus at a distance of about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
If we could capture a baby picture of our Sun, it might resemble this, NASA stated in a post with the image. This @NASAWebb image shows a young star with gas jets shooting out of its poles at supersonic speeds. Although it is only a few tens of thousands of years old, this star will resemble our Sun when it matures.
According to NASA, a Herbig-Haro occurs when high-speed shock waves from stellar winds or jets of gas emitted by these young stars collide with neighboring gas and dust.
Young star who is tens of thousands of years old
The young star, which is only a few tens of thousands of years old and has a mass of only 8% of the sun, has been classified as a Class 0 protostar. The star will eventually develop into a star similar to the sun, though.
Webb can map out the structure of the outflows thanks to excited molecules like silicon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, and carbon monoxide that produce infrared light. In the recently revealed image, the young star’s surroundings are depicted in previously unheard-of detail.
“Earlier observations of HH 211 with ground-based telescopes revealed giant bow shocks moving north-west and south-east, cavity-like structures in shocked hydrogen and carbon monoxide, as well as a knotty and wiggling bipolar jet in silicon monoxide. The object’s outflow is relatively slow compared to more evolved protostars with comparable types of outflows, according to researchers using Webb’s latest observations, according to NASA.
The Webb telescope, which was created in 2021 and began gathering data in 2022, revolutionized our understanding of the early universe while taking magnificent pictures of the cosmos.
Since the telescope’s start-up, it has released a vast amount of previously unheard-of data and revealed the presence of many of the earliest known black holes and galaxies. In comparison to the Hubble telescope, Webb also shown to be roughly 100 times more powerful.
