Newborn star shaped like an hourglass revealed in marvelous JWST images

A new star is born, and it already has an amazing figure! NASA scientists have released a stunning new image that looks like an hourglass on fire. In actuality, it’s a fiery protostar that emerged from the dark cloud L1527, photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Tracking the formation of stars could give astronomers more insight into how our own Sun and solar system may have looked in their early stages.

While the star itself is hidden from view in the “neck” of the hourglass shape, a glimpse of it can be seen as a dark line across the middle of the neck. Light from the star is leaking out, creating an illumination within nearby gas and dust. James Webb was successfully able to capture this normally elusive view through its Near-Infrared Camera. The clouds in the Taurus star-forming region can only be viewed in infrared light.

The orange-blue colors seen in the image hold cavities that formed as material shoots away from the protostar and collide with surrounding matter. The colors were the result of accumulating layers of dust between the clouds and the telescope. The thinnest layers of dust exhibit a blue hue. As dust thickens, there is less blue light to escape, creating pockets of orange instead.

As the star moves materials away from it, it shocked filaments of molecular hydrogen. Having shocks and turbulence delays the creation of new stars, which would form all throughout the cloud. With star formation inhibited, the newborn star can take as much space and materials for itself as it wants.

The protostar within the dark cloud L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera
The protostar within the dark cloud L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is embedded within a cloud of material feeding its growth. Ejections from the star have cleared out cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared view. The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar “burps,” or sporadic ejections. (Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale, A. Pagan, and A. Koekemoer (STScI))

While it might feel old for humans, 100,000 years is relatively young for a star. Its age, along with the brightness it exudes in far-infrared light makes it a class 0 protostar – the earliest stage for a star. This means that L1527 has a long way to go before it becomes a fully developed star.

For example, L1527 is still within a thick cloud of dust and gas and does not create its own energy through nuclear fusion of energy. Developing energy is an essential component of becoming a fully-fledged star. What’s more, the star is very unstable. The star is in the form of a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas between 20 and 40 percent of the mass of our solar system’s star.

While the new star can’t make its own energy, it is getting closer to doing so as it collects mass. With more mass, the core gradually compresses to a place where it might be able to undergo nuclear fusion. This is seen in the photo where the surrounding dust and gas clouds gravitate towards the center where the star is located.

As material falls in, it creates a dense spiral disk around the center known as an accretion disk. The accretion disk feeds material to the baby star to help it grow bigger. Eventually, all the accumulated mass and compression will trigger a rise in core temperature that would reach the threshold for nuclear fusion.

The disk in the photo may seem small at first glance, but scientists estimate it to be the size of our solar system. NASA astronomers suggest that it’s not unusual for material to clump together in this dense band. The clumping signals the formation of new planets in the distant future.

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Comments

  1. That’s not what this is. This is a black hole that moved through nebula. The nebula is behind it (this is not the consensus view) the gravity of the black hole (which is a toroid) sucks in the nebula and it blows it out the jets through the hole in the toroid along its axis, space time blows out of black holes which is what causes universal expansion, but because it blows out of the surface, the axis of the toroid has the most space density blowing out (because the donut hole in the middle is blowing space into the middle from all sides) so the gravitational pull of the dust from the sides is less impeded by the spacetime rushing out the sides, the flow from the top and bottom because the gravity fights the denser neutrino (the voxel of space time) flow out the axis, so the nebula is being pulled into the black hole slower from the top and bottom than the volume of the nebula around the sides. If this is true there should be no nebula gas along the axis of the hourglass either and it should be flowing in through 2 strange cone shaped geometries before it is hyper accelerated and blown out the axial direction like a pulsar, if you they detected hyper accelerated material or neutrino emissions along the axis of the hourglass then this corroborates this suggestion.

  2. If it were a formed/forming star, then the stellar wind blowing the star dust away would be either sucking everything in, or blowing everything away. Even the nebula cloud formations show denser regions in the cone pulling down while the edges of the clouds are being blown back, and the non-defined edges of the cones suggest that when a cloud, drawn in by gravity, eeks over into the less-neutrino dense fields outside the hourglass, they get pulled in toward the black hole much faster, you can see how clearly the gravity draws out the gas that wanders out of the cone at the boundary, of course the gravity from the other side of the donut probably tends to prevent it from wandering too far away from the cone, it’s a really interesting dynamic, but if you really put the question to a mainstream scientist to tell you exactly why the shape of the cloud is what it is, they wouldn’t be able to explain it. If a star just formed, then it would blow all of the dust away from itself uniformly all around, there would never be ages of time that it would take to show an hourglass of nebula to form, this formation is eons old, the distances represented by the length of the cone is light years, a star that ignites doesn’t hold gas in a cloud like this for thousands of years, that’s how you know it’s not a forming star. imo.

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