Telescope captures star being born 1,300 light-years from Earth
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Mark McCaughrean & Sam Pearson, CC BY-SA / ESO, Mark J. McCaughrean
While telescopes have been around for quite a while, recent years has seen some incredible discoveries from using the specialist equipment.
An incredible image has been released from the James Webb Space Telescope, which provides brand new clues about how the stars we see in the night's sky come into existence.
The recently released snap shows protostar HH 212, which is located about 1,300 light-years from Earth.
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The star coming into existence is likely no more than 50,000 years old, according to the BBC.
HH 212 was first discovered by astronomers back in 1993 near the Belt of Orion.
Since then, experts have taken a lot of images to try and uncover how the budding star is slowly forming over a period of three decades.
The latest image reveals interesting details about the star formation, with astronomers spotting symmetrical pink plumes of gas emissions coming from both sides of the protostar.
According to Mark McCaughrean, a senior advisor at the European Space Agency, this is apparently the 'first-time' scientists have seen a 'good color image' of the protostar. Such image has not been possible before with ground telescopes.
Physics suggest the outflows of gas seen within the protostar are the means by which it regulates its birthing.
McCaughrean told the BBC: "As the blobby ball of gas at the centre compacts down, it rotates. But if it rotates too fast, it will fly apart, so something has to get rid of the angular momentum.
"We think it's jets and outflows. We think that as all the material shrinks down, magnetic fields are pulled together and then some of the material coming in through the disc gets captured on magnetic fields and is thrown out through the poles. That's why we call these structures bi-polar."
The BBC report states that the scene captured by the telescope 'would have looked much the same' to when our sun was in its development stage.
The James Webb Space Telescope is truly making history with this discovery, with Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, previously saying: "Webb has given us a more intricate understanding of galaxies, stars and the atmospheres of planets outside of our solar system than ever before, laying the groundwork for NASA to lead the world in a new era of scientific discovery and the search for habitable worlds."