On Wednesday, the James Webb Space Telescope released the latest image of celestial splendor: an ethereal hourglass of orange and blue dust rippling from the newly formed star at its center. The colored clouds are only visible in infrared light, so they have never been captured before by the Webb Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), NASA and the European Space Agency said in a statement.

Known as Protostar L1527, the very young star is obscured by the edge of a spinning disk of gas in the hourglass neck. But light leaks from the top and bottom of the disk, illuminating the hourglass-shaped clouds. In the statement, it was stated that the clouds were formed when the material ejected from the star collided with the surrounding material. The powder is thinnest in the blue regions and densest in the orange parts, he adds.

The protostar, which is only 100,000 years old and in the early stages of star formation, is not yet in a position to generate its own energy. The surrounding black disk, which is the size of our solar system, will feed material into the protostar until it eventually reaches the “nuclear fusion initiation threshold,” the paper said.

“Ultimately, this image of L1527 provides a window into what our Sun and Solar System looked like in its infancy,” the newspaper added.

This video zooms in on protostar L152 to show the object seen by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope embedded within the cloud of material feeding its growth. Material ejected from the star cleared up the gaps above and below, the edges of which glow orange and blue in this infrared image. The upper central region has a bubble-like shape due to star “burps” or sporadic eruptions. Webb also detects filaments made of molecular hydrogen shocked by past stellar emissions. Interestingly, the edges of the spaces in the upper-left and lower-right corners appear straight, while the edges in the upper-right and lower-left corners appear curved. The lower right area appears blue because there is less dust between it and Webb than the orange areas above it. Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, unWISE/JPL-Caltech/D.

Protostar is located about 430 light-years from Earth in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a stellar nursery for hundreds of nearly formed stars. In operation since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built and has produced an unprecedented amount of data and stunning images. Scientists hope this will herald a new era of discovery. One of the main goals of the $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main area of ​​research is exoplanets, which are planets outside of Earth’s solar system.