It turns out that some of the most powerful phenomena in space originate from its youngest inhabitants. The latest cosmic candy sent back by NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) contains jets of stellar material erupting from the poles of a very young planet. stars and race through space at supersonic speeds.

The jets, collectively called Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), are located in an energetic pocket of space located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. In this region, the protostar actively sucks in gas and dust from the surrounding area to expand, but in the meantime ejects matter into space in what astronomers call bipolar flow. And as these jets of matter moved through space, JWST’s sharp infrared eye was able to capture their interaction with interstellar matter as bright, colorful vortices.

The protostar (not visible in the Webb image) is believed to be a binary star and, with only 8% of its current mass, probably represents what our Sun was like when it was only a few tens of thousands of years old. “It will eventually evolve into a star like the sun,” JWST officials wrote in a statement released Thursday, September 14.

Researchers say HH 211 is one of the youngest and closest examples of new star-ejecting material, making it an ideal object for JWST to observe. This telescope is unmatched for its infrared capabilities and is a game-changer for stellar astronomers as it allows them to see beyond the thick blankets of gas and dust that surround very young stars. Providing such access to closed stellar bodies ultimately helps scientists unravel the objects’ chemical composition and behavior.

Examining data on HH 211 collected by the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument at JWST, researchers noticed that the jets from young stars were much slower and richer in molecules such as carbon monoxide, silicon monoxide and molecular hydrogen. This compares to faster jets that erupt from older stars. According to this Current research, This situation, which explains the JWST observation of HH 211, is primarily due to the fact that the shock waves surrounding the young star are not yet strong enough to break the jet molecules into pieces. atoms.

HH 211 belongs to a group of objects known to evolve rapidly, with gas eddies disappearing only a few years after discovery and new ones forming in seemingly empty regions of space. Source