Imagine if you could go back in time 4.6 billion years and take a picture of our sun being born. How could it be?
Well, you can get an idea with this amazing new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Toward the center of this object, called HH212, a star is being born that is perhaps no more than 50,000 years old.
The scene was very similar to when our Sun was the same age.
You can’t actually see the brightness of the protostar because it’s hidden inside a dense rotating disk of gas and dust.
All you see are the reddish-pink planes taking off in opposite polar directions.
HH212 is located in Orion, near the three bright stars that make up the “belt” of the legendary Orion that gave its name to the constellation.
The distance from Earth is about 1,300 light-years.
Physics suggests that these powerful gaseous emissions are how the budding star regulates its birth.
“When the ball of gaseous mass contracts in the centre, it spins. But if it spins too fast, it will break up, so something must get rid of the angular momentum,” explained Professor Mark Macogrian, the agency’s scientific advisor. Space Agency (ESA).
“We think they are jets and emissions. We think that as all the matter contracts, the magnetic fields come together and then some of the material that comes through the disk gets caught in the magnetic fields and is ejected through the poles. That’s why we call these dipole structures,” the scientist told the BBC. .
Reddish pink colour It indicates the presence of molecular hydrogen. They are two hydrogen atoms bonded together (like the “HH” in the name of a protostar).
Shock waves move through the emission, energizing it and making it glow brightly in this Webb image, which was captured mostly at the infrared wavelength of 2.12 microns (that’s the second part of the protostar’s name).
The image of HH212 was captured by the JWST Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The protostar itself cannot be seen because it is obscured by a dense disk of gas and dust falling inward. There are some mature stars in the field of view, but most of the points of light are very distant galaxies.
In the annotated image above, look closely at the flows on the left and right and trace the glow node on each. Count the collision arcs, when the faster material collides with the slower material directly in front of it.
The structures are remarkably symmetrical…except that there appears to be an additional, albeit very chaotic, shock arc on the right.
In fact, there is likely a complementary shock arc on the other side.
There are definitely hints of this in a larger version of this Webb photo. It’s just that the density of gas and dust in space in this direction is less dense, so there is less material and the shock structure appears more diffuse.
Astronomers have been studying HH212 for 30 years, taking pictures from time to time to see how it has changed.
As expected with the Webb Super Telescope, its new view is 10 times sharper than anything we’ve had before, and it will allow scientists to do just that. Delve into the processes that drive star formation.
One interesting feature is stitching the entire image record together to create a movie, to see how elements in the jet structures change over time.
Repeated observations mean that the speed at which these elements move can also be measured: 100 kilometers per second or more.
I kind of suggested that HH stands for molecular hydrogen, which is quite appropriate. But in fact the abbreviation stands for Herpege Harrow, in honor of George Herbig and Guillermo Haro, who did pioneering work on this kind of thing in the 1940s and 1950s.
You will no doubt be surprised by the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope. It is not only the resolution of the image that can be achieved with its 6.5-meter primary mirror, but also the breadth of color that its instruments can now detect that makes the telescope so special.
“As we said, the key wavelength for observing these objects – for observing impacted molecular hydrogen – is 2.12 microns, or about four times longer than the visible average. But for the first time, we now have a good color image of this particular object. “We have a good color image of this particular object,” Professor Macogrian said. The object is that we can observe it at other wavelengths that simply cannot be seen from ground-based telescopes. “This will help us understand what actually happens in the jets.”
James Webb was expected to transform many areas of astronomy The study of Herbig-Haro objects has certainly benefited.
Look at the photo below and you can marvel at the HH212’s cousin, called the HH211.
This object, in the constellation Perseus, is younger, also only thousands of years old. And the belief that our sun began like this.
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