NASA releases 'baby picture' of a star that will grow up to be much like our sun
By Clare Marie Schneider
The James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of a newborn star that reveals what Earth's sun may have looked like when it was only a few tens of thousands of years old. ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) hide caption
toggle caption ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)The James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of a newborn star that reveals what Earth's sun may have looked like when it was only a few tens of thousands of years old.
ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)Ever wondered what the Sun looked like in its infancy?
A new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured what Earth's sun looked like when it was only a few tens of thousands of years old.
The image of Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), released by NASA on Sept. 14, shows the outflow of a young star. "An infantile analogue of our Sun," NASA said in a
Located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, HH21 has only about 8% of the Sun's mass. A Class 0 protostar, meaning the nascent star is less than 100,000 years old, "eventually will grow into a star like the Sun," on its website.
The stunning, high-resolution image, with shades of blue and pink erupting from a dark center, shows the luminous region surrounding the newborn star, known as a Herbig-Haro object. As the new star ejects gas jets, these winds collide with neighboring gas and dust, producing the colorful outflow we see in the image.
On X (previously Twitter), the image of HH211 inspired different interpretations from viewers.
like stretching when i wake up from a nap
— t̀͆̕ḯ̐͋m̓͆͝e̓̒͠ (@timenotspace)
"like stretching when i wake up from a nap," on a NASA post about the infrared image.
"That kind of looks like the jet from a sci-fi particle cannon," .
, newborn stars are "invariably still embedded within the gas from the molecular cloud in which they formed," making them hard to document. However, Webb's sensitive infrared instruments make it a powerful tool to record these celestial bodies.
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