NASA captures rare image of the birth of a Sun-like star via James Webb telescope

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a rare image of the birth of a newborn star. The captured image reveals jets of star matter blasting from the poles of a very young star and zipping through space at supersonic speeds, according to a Space.com report.

The high-resolution, near-infrared look into the jets, called the Herbig-Haro (HH) 211, shows exquisite detail of the outflow of a young star, an infantile analogue of our Sun, NASA said.

Sharing the details about the captured image, NASA tweeted, “What might a baby picture of our Sun look like? Seen in this Webb 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.”

NASA mentioned that the Herbig-Haro objects spotted in the image are the bright regions surrounding the newborn stars which are formed due to the stellar winds or because of the jet gas coming out of the newborn star. It happens because the newborn stars strike with the other present gas or dust at a higher speed.

According to NASA's report, the image of HH 211 shared by the James Webb telescope clearly elaborates an outflow from a protostar which is an infantile analogue of the Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8 percent of the present-day Sun, NASA said.

The new star will eventually grow into a star like the Sun, the space agency said.

In the process of capturing such an unprecedented image through a telescope, Infrared imaging plays the most crucial role. It helps in studying the newborn stars and their growth with time as such stars are embedded in the gas from the molecular cloud in which they are formed.

Molecules including molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide emit infrared lights that can be collected by the James Webb telescope to frame them into the structure of the star’s growth.

A team of researchers at NASA are measuring the velocities of the innermost outflow structure which is found to be roughly 80 to 100 kilometres per second.

However, the difference in these velocities between the sections of the outflow and the colliding shockwave is comparatively very small. Hence, the researchers have concluded that the outflow from the newborn star is mostly made up of molecules.