See a new star being born in stunning James Webb image

By Georgina Torbet November 19, 2022

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of the birth of a new star. As dust and gas clump together and eventually collapses under the force of gravity, it becomes a protostar: the core of a new star, rotating and forming a magnetic field, throwing off material in two dramatic jets of gas.

This process is on display in this image of the cloud L1527, taken using Webb’s NIRCam instrument. Looking in the infrared, this camera can capture the clouds of material given off by the protostar which would be invisible to the human eye.

The protostar L1527, shown in this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. — The protostar L1527, shown in this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, is embedded within a cloud of material that is feeding its growth. Material ejected from the star has cleared out cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared view. The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar ‘burps,’ or sporadic ejections. Webb also detects filaments made of molecular hydrogen that has been shocked by past stellar ejections. Intriguingly, the edges of the cavities at the upper left and lower right appear straight, while the boundaries at the upper right and lower left are curved. The region at the lower right appears blue, as there’s less dust between it and Webb than the orange regions above it. NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI)

In the image, the protostar itself can’t be seen but is located right in the center of the hourglass shape. That shape is formed from clouds of dust and gas which are shaped by the jets given off by the protostar, with thinner areas of dust appearing blue and thicker areas appearing orange. In addition to the dust, there are also filaments of hydrogen gas visible, shaped by ejections from the protostar.

Recommended Videos

Researchers estimate that this protostar is around 100,000 years old, making it a baby by stellar standards. For comparison, our sun is around 4.6 billion years old and is expected to live to around 9 to 10 billion years of age. The protostar is also smaller than our sun, at between 20 to 40% of its mass, and most importantly it is not yet producing heat through fusion.

The protostar will continue gathering dust and gas and increasing in mass. As this material falls into the protostar due to gravity, it heats up because of friction. To start fusing hydrogen, the protostar needs to reach a core temperature of around 10 million degrees Kelvin. At this temperature, the gases become plasma, and hydrogen atoms start fusing together to form helium, releasing energy in the form of heat and light. This is the point at which a protostar becomes a main sequence star.

Some of the material left around the protostar could even become a planet one day. “Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window onto what our Sun and Solar System looked like in their infancy,” Webb scientists write.

Topics

Tech News

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Space

James Webb trains its sights on the Extreme Outer Galaxy

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has observed the very outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. Known as the Extreme Outer Galaxy, this region is located more than 58 000 light-years from the Galactic centre.

A gorgeous new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a bustling region of star formation at the distant edge of the Milky Way. Called, dramatically enough, the Extreme Outer Galaxy, this region is located 58,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy, which is more than twice the distance from the center than Earth is.

Scientists were able to use Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments to capture the region in sparkling detail, showing molecular clouds called Digel Clouds 1 and 2 containing clumps of hydrogen, which enables the formation of new stars.

Space

See the gorgeous images of Mercury taken by BepiColombo

BepiColumbo says goodbye to Mercury.

The European Space Agency's BepiColombo spacecraft recently made a close flyby of Mercury, and it snapped some stunning pictures along the way.

Launched in 2018 along with Japanese space agency JAXA, the spacecraft is preparing to go into orbit around Mercury in 2026, when it will perform up-close analysis of the planet's surface, interior, and magnetic field. To get into position, the spacecraft performed two flybys of Venus, and has now performed four of six planned Mercury flybys. Each of these flybys offers the opportunity to glimpse the planet as the spacecraft passes by.

Space

James Webb spots another pair of galaxies forming a question mark

The galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154 is so massive it is warping the fabric of space-time and distorting the appearance of galaxies behind it, an effect known as gravitational lensing. This natural phenomenon magnifies distant galaxies and can also make them appear in an image multiple times, as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope saw here.

The internet had a lot of fun last year when eagle-eyed viewers spotted a galaxy that looked like a question mark in an image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, Webb has stumbled across another questioning galaxy, and the reasons for its unusual shape reveal an important fact about how the telescope looks at some of the most distant galaxies ever observed.

The new question mark-shaped galaxy is part of an image of galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154, which is so massive that it distorts space-time. Extremely massive objects -- in this case, a cluster of many galaxies -- exert so much gravitational force that they bend space, so the light traveling past these objects is stretched. It's similar using a magnifying glass. In some cases, this effect, called gravitational lensing, can even make the same galaxy appear multiple times in different places within one image.