The James Webb Space Telescope revealed its latest image of the celestial majesty on Wednesday, orange glass and blue dust being shot from the newly formed star at its center.
Visible clouds are only visible in infrared light, so they had never been seen before with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), NASA and the European Space Agency said.
A much smaller star, known as protostar L1527, is hidden in the darkness at the edge of the circular disk of gas at the neck of the hourglass.
However, light emerges from above and below the disk, illuminating the hourglass-shaped clouds.
Clouds are made of material ejected from stars colliding with surrounding objects, the statement said. The dust is thinnest in the blue parts and thickest in the orange parts, they added.
The protostar, which is only 100,000 years old and is in the early stages of star formation, has yet to generate its own energy.
The rotating dark disk, which is about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches “the threshold for nuclear initiation,” he said.
“Ultimately, these observations of L1527 provide a window into what our Sun and the Sun looked like when they were babies,” it added.
Protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud, a cluster of hundreds of stars about 430 light-years from Earth.
Operating since July, Webb is the most powerful telescope ever built and has already produced unprecedented amounts of information and stunning images.
Scientists believe it will herald a new era of discovery.
One of the main goals of the US $ 10 billion telescope is to study the life of stars. Another major research area is exoplanets, planets outside of Earth’s Sun.
© Agence France-Presse
