Just in time for Independence Day, NASA has released a stunning image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) showing incredible red, white, and blue fireworks exploding in the cosmos.
As the United States celebrates its birthday, this cosmic “red rocket glow” is actually the violent eruption of an infant star at the heart of the blue-and-white cloud of gas and dust, or nebulawhich gave rise to it. The nebula in question is called L1527which is located about 460 light years from Earth in the Taurus constellation.
Similar to a cosmic butterflyThe central “body” of the nebula is a bright object. protostarwhich is estimated to be about 100,000 years old. If that seems ancient (and it certainly is, compared to the 248-year-old United States), remember that our star, Sunand the Solar system There are more than 4.5 billion years around it.
In fact, the stellar object at the center of this nebula is not even a fully developed star. These cosmic fireworks mark the process by which the protostar is transforming into a main sequence star like the sun.
Birth of a nation and birth of a star
Stars are born from vast molecular clouds As overdense areas accumulate more and more mass, they eventually collapse under their own gravity. This forms a protostar, which then continues to collect material from the postnatal cloud of gas and dust left over from the molecular cloud that gave rise to it.
This process continues until the protostar has gathered enough mass that the pressure and temperature in its core are great enough to trigger the Nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium.
This is the process responsible for the vast majority of the energy emitted by stars, and it is also the process that defines what a “main sequence” star is.
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The new observation of L1527 and its protostar was made by JWST Mid-infrared instrumentIn the image, the white and blue “lobes” extending from the central region are outflows emitted in opposite directions along the protostar's rotation axis as it consumes gas and dust from its natal cocoon to facilitate its growth.
The jets of water are causing shock waves called “bow shocks” in the molecular gas surrounding the protostar. These bow shocks are similar to the curved crests of water that emerge from the passage of a ship in seas, rivers and lakes on Earth.
These shocked regions glow in comparison to the dark gas in the rest of the region because the gas there is being energized or “excited” by these shock waves. The blue regions represent shocked gas dominated by carbon-based molecules known as Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
At the heart of this emerging cosmic butterfly, the JWST image shows a dark line representing a disk of matter surrounding the protostar and gradually reaching toward it.
The central region is white due to sporadic “star burps” of material from this feeding star. This white glow above and below the central protostar indicates a mixture of ionized neon and thick dust being ejected away from the messy feeding protostar. The sharp red spot around the protostar is an artifact of JWST optics.
This is not the JWST's first attempt to image this infant star and its gaseous cradle. In November 2022, the powerful space telescope observed L1527 with its Near Infrared Camera Instrument (NIRCam)The image is slightly less patriotic than the MIRI version, dominated mainly by orange hues, although the central star remains in red tones and the lower “wing” of this tilted cosmic butterfly is dominated by blue.
As the L1527 protostar continues to age and transform into a mature main sequence star, it will continue to consume the matter around it. The growing star will also release energy jets and radiation that pushes away much of what remains of this molecular cloud. As a result, many of the structures seen in the MIRI and NIRCam images will disappear.
Once the transformation is complete, this beautiful cosmic butterfly will disappear and the star itself will become much brighter.
Using two instruments to observe L1527 in both the near- and mid-infrared, JWST has revealed the complexities of the system's behavior, including how the central protostar influences its surrounding region.
Many more stars are being born in the Taurus molecular cloud complex, a star nursery containing hundreds of newly formed stars, where L1527 is located. The influence of stars like this could affect this complex and prevent the formation of other stars by disrupting the wider molecular cloud while asserting its own independence.
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