NASA's James Webb Telescope captures rare image of a newborn sun-like star

NASA's most powerful telescope the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a young star's supersonic outflow, which gave a glimpse of how our Sun would have appeared thousands of years ago.

The rare image has captured jets of star matter which can be seen blasting from a very young star's poles and speeding into space at supersonic speeds. The bright regions surrounding the newborn stars are called Herbig-Haro objects.

This specific Herbig-Haro object captured in the image is called Herbig-Haro (HH) 211 and is at a distance of approximately 1,000 light-years away from Earth, currently in the constellation Perseus.

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Posting 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.''

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A Herbig-Haro takes place 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,'' explained NASA.

Tens of thousands of years old young star

The young star has been identified as a Class 0 protostar which is only a few tens of thousands of years old and has a mass that is just 8 per cent of the sun. However, the star is projected to grow eventually into a star like the sun.

Excited molecules like silicon monoxide, molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide emit infrared light which allows Webb to map out the structure of the outflows. The surroundings of the young star have been captured in unprecedented detail in the newly-released image.

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"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," stated NASA.

The Webb telescope, which came into existence in 2021 and started collecting data in 2022, reshaped the early universe's understanding while capturing stunning images of the cosmos.

Since the telescope began operation, it revealed the existence of many of the earliest-known black holes and galaxies and shared a huge amount of unprecedented data. Webb also emerged as around 100 times more powerful compared to the Hubble telescope.

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