A star is born: NASA takes us all the way from here to maternity

NASA has marked a year of discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope with a spectacular image of stars being born.

This image by NASA’s James Webb telescope shows a small star-forming region of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. Picture: NASA / AFP

Jets of red gas bursting into the cosmos, and a glowing cave of dust is how NASA has marked a year of discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope with a spectacular image of stars being born.

The picture is of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the nearest stellar nursery to Earth, whose proximity at 390 light years allows for a crisp close-up by the most powerful orbital camera ever built.

“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said.

“Every new image is a new ­discovery, empowering scientists around the globe to ask and answer questions they once could never dream of.”

Webb’s image shows about 50 young stars, of similar mass to our Sun or smaller. Some have the signature shadows of circumstellar disks – a sign that planets may eventually form around them. Huge jets of hydrogen appear horizontally in the upper third of the image, and on the right.

“These occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets into space like a newborn first stretching its arms out into the world,” the US space agency said in a statement.

“At the bottom of the image, you can see a young star that’s energetic enough that it’s blowing a bubble in the cloud of dust and gas from which it was born,” Christine Chen, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb, said.

It does so through a combination of its light and a stellar wind linked to it, she added.

Interstellar space is filled with gas and dust, which in turn serves as the raw material for new stars and planets.

“Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar life cycle with new clarity. Our own Sun experienced a phase like this long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another star’s story,” said Webb project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan.

Webb was launched in December 2021 from French Guiana, on a 1.5 million kilometre voyage to a region called the second Lagrange point. Its first full-colour picture was revealed on July 11 last year and showed the clearest view yet of the early universe, going back 13 billion years – about three times longer than Earth has existed.

Unlike its predecessor Hubble, it operates primarily in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to look back nearer towards the start of time, and to better penetrate dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are being formed today.

Key discoveries include some of the earliest galaxies formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, identifying at unprecedented resolution the atmospheric compositions of planets outside our solar system.

AFP