The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful telescope developed by mankind, has captured the supersonic outflow of a young star that gives a glimpse of how our Sun may have looked, thousands of years ago. The rare image features jets of star matter blasting from the poles of a very young star and zipping through space at supersonic speeds.
Notably, the bright regions around newborn stars, as seen in the image are called Herbig-Haro objects. This specific Herbig-Haro object is called Herbig-Haro (HH) 211 and is located approximately 1,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus.
Sharing the image, NASA wrote, ''If we could take a baby picture of our Sun, it might look something like this. Seen in this @NASAWebb image is a newborn star with supersonic jets of gas spewing from its poles. It's only a few tens of thousands of years old here, but when it grows up, it'll be much like our Sun.''
See the image here:
A Herbig-Haro occurs when ''formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds,'' NASA explained. The young star is a Class 0 protostar which is just a few tens of thousands of years old and only has a mass of around 8 percent of the sun. However, it is projected to eventually grow into a star like the sun.
The infrared light emitted by excited molecules, such as molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and silicon monoxide, allows Webb to map out the structure of the outflows. The newly-released image captures the surroundings of the young star in unprecedented detail, with some 5-10 times higher resolution than any previous capture of HH 211.
"Earlier observations of HH 211 with ground-based telescopes revealed giant bow shocks moving away from us (north-west) and moving towards us (south-east) and cavity-like structures in shocked hydrogen and carbon monoxide respectively, as well as a knotty and wiggling bipolar jet in silicon monoxide. Researchers have used Webb's new observations to determine that the object's outflow is relatively slow in comparison to more evolved protostars with similar types of outflows," NASA said.
The Webb telescope, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data in 2022, has reshaped the understanding of the early universe while taking stunning pictures of the cosmos. Since becoming operational, Webb has revealed the existence of the earliest-known galaxies, and black holes, and unleashed a raft of unprecedented data. Webb is about 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope.
