James Webb Telescope Reveals Celestial Hourglass Formed By Embryonic Star (theguardian.com) 16
The James Webb space telescope has revealed its latest image of celestial majesty, an ethereal hourglass of orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its center. The Guardian reports: The colourful clouds are only visible in infrared light, so had never been seen before being captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (Nircam), Nasa and the European Space Agency said in a statement on Wednesday. The very young star, known as protostar L1527, is hidden in darkness by the edge of a rotating disk of gas at the neck of the hourglass. However, light spills out from the top and bottom of the disk, lighting up the hourglass-shaped clouds.
The clouds are created by material ejected from the star colliding with surrounding matter, the statement said. The dust is thinnest in the blue sections and thickest in the orange parts, it added. The protostar, which is just 100,000 years old and at the earliest stage of star formation, is not yet able to generate its own energy. The surrounding black disk, which is about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches "the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin," the statement said. "Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our sun and solar system looked like in their infancy," it added. The protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud, a stellar nursery home to hundreds of nearly formed stars around 430 light years from Earth.
The clouds are created by material ejected from the star colliding with surrounding matter, the statement said. The dust is thinnest in the blue sections and thickest in the orange parts, it added. The protostar, which is just 100,000 years old and at the earliest stage of star formation, is not yet able to generate its own energy. The surrounding black disk, which is about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches "the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin," the statement said. "Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our sun and solar system looked like in their infancy," it added. The protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud, a stellar nursery home to hundreds of nearly formed stars around 430 light years from Earth.
It's full of stars! (Score:4, Insightful)
What amazes me with JWST: In every single image it takes there is a crazy amount of background galaxies visible! Each with billions of stars. And even more planets. And perhaps even life?
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I get the same feeling simply by looking at the sky at night with a clear sky. You can easily see zillions of galaxies with your bare eyes you know...
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Hm, I think the only one you can see under good conditions is Andromeda, M31. And of course the LMC and the SMC, but those are satellites to our own galaxy...
Maybe there is some Quasar that is visible with the naked eye, but I doubt it.
But seeing all the stars in our galaxy's neighborhood is still pretty cool.
Re: It's full of stars! (Score:3)
Most galaxies are well below naked eye detection. About 8 are visible under ideal conditions:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Apparent magnitude ~6 is about as good as the naked eye can see. Maybe some folks can hit 7 or 7.5. Note that AM is reverse log, with a scaling of ~2.5 for every 1.0 in AM.
https://skyandtelescope.org/as... [skyandtelescope.org]
Among the top 200 galaxies, most are in the AM 9-11 range, which is 6-40x below the best naked eye limit.
http://www.icc.dur.ac.uk/~tt/L... [dur.ac.uk]
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As it was pointed out earlier you don't see "zillions of galaxies" "simply by looking at the sky". Even if you're calling this or that object "galaxy" there aren't too many things visible with the naked eye, in fact the regular stars (from our galaxy) are the vast majority, beside very few planets, messier objects, the occasional comet, etc. And these look like they might be "a lot" but really aren't, they are just 6000 all together - all "fixed" stars that can be seen with good eyes, away from light and at
Re: It's full of stars! (Score:2)
Totally agree. At a quick glance they look like stars, but then you zoom in....
What are the measurements? (Score:4, Funny)
That doesn't look like 36-24-36.
Orange and blue dust? (Score:3)
The published image looks orange and blue, but that is only because of what color mapping the JWST staff have chosen to apply to the various infrared wavelengths that Nircam detects. They image processing folks could have changed the mapping to make it look green and purple, and that would be equally valid.
Re:Orange and blue dust? (Score:5, Informative)
They image processing folks could have changed the mapping to make it look green and purple, and that would be equally valid.
Technically they could but generally they follow the visible spectrum where the shortest wavelengths are mapped to violet and the longest ones are red. It is probably done for simplicity as they do not have to publish a legend to show which color means what.
Re:Orange and blue dust? (Score:5, Informative)
They do publish the legend of what colors mean what. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F200W, Green: F335M, Red: F444W, Orange: F470N
https://webbtelescope.org/cont... [webbtelescope.org]
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I think most folks with even a passing interest in these things understand how false color imaging works, but I would be interested in seeing a side by side of what this formation would look like were I sitting a bit away from it. I know it says the clouds are in infrared and invisible but what about the protostar itself? Is the disc still visible? I get that it's important to put out these impressive wallpaper-worthy pictures for the headlines and publications but I'd still love to see what they would actu
Infrared is not blue, nor orange (Score:2)
"an ethereal hourglass of orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its center. The Guardian reports: The colourful clouds are only visible in infrared light..."
If it's "only visible in infrared," then the dust is not orange and it's not blue.
The orange and blue in the public image are false colors. They can be any color you choose: chartreuse and mauve if you like, magenta and ochre, anything.