The James Webb space telescope has revealed its latest image of celestial majesty, a hourglass of orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its centre.
The colourful clouds are only visible in infrared light, so had never been seen before being captured by Webb’s Near Infrared Camera, Nasa and the European Space Agency said in a statement on Wednesday.
The very young star, known as protostar L1527, is hidden in darkness by the edge of a rotating disk of gas at the neck of the hourglass.
However, light spills out from the top and bottom of the disk, lighting up the hourglass shaped clouds.
The clouds are created by material ejected from the star colliding with surrounding matter, 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 about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin.
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.
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.
One of the main goals for the $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside Earth’s solar system.
