James Webb Observes Sun-like Star

Report by Alekhya Chavan

The James Webb Space Telescope, or Webb, is like a space detective. It’s up there to help us learn about faraway stuff in space that’s tricky to see with regular telescopes. Recently, Webb took a picture of something called a Herbig-Haro object (HH), which is where baby stars are born.

These baby stars are surrounded by gas and dust and, when they’re born, they shoot out air, creating shockwaves in space. Webb can see these shockwaves because it can spot things in a special way called “infrared.” It’s like wearing secret space glasses that let us see dust and gas around these baby stars – something normal telescopes can’t do.

When Webb looked at one of these shockwave areas called HH 211, it found something interesting. It saw a baby star, called a “protostar,” that’s just like the Sun when it was really young. This little star is only about 8% as big as our Sun today and just a few tens of thousands of years old. Our Sun, in comparison, is super old, like billions of years old!

Webb’s picture also showed us “bow shocks” in space. These are like ripples made when the baby star’s air hits other things in space. Imagine it like tossing a pebble in a pond, and the waves spread out. Well, in space, they go north, south, and in the middle, there’s a special jet of stuff.

Here’s the twist – that middle jet was kind of wiggly, like a zigzag. That surprised scientists and made them think that this baby star might actually be two stars, like twins. Webb’s picture was so clear that it could see this twisty detail, and it’s the best picture ever of HH 211.

Before Webb, other telescopes checked out HH 211, but they couldn’t see it this well. They saw big bow shocks moving away and toward us, and some special gas. Webb helped scientists figure out how fast things in HH 211 are moving. The baby star’s air is moving at about 48-60 miles per second, but those shockwaves are pretty slow.

What’s super cool is that this tells us that the gas around this young star is mostly made of tiny things called molecules, and they like to stick together. It’s like having puzzle pieces that haven’t fallen apart yet. Usually, when things move really fast, they break into smaller pieces. But in HH 211, these pieces are all friends because they’re not zooming around too quickly.

So, Webb is our space detective, uncovering secrets about baby stars and how they grow up. It teams up with smart scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency to do this big job. Isn’t space full of amazing discoveries? Webb helps us solve these cosmic puzzles!

Featured Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)