NASA’s Webb captures celestial fireworks around forming star

The cosmos seems to come to life with a crackling explosion of pyrotechnics in this new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Taken with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), this fiery hourglass marks the scene of a very young object in the process of becoming a star. A central protostar grows in the neck of the hourglass, gathering material from a thin protoplanetary disk, seen from the edge as a dark line.

The protostar, a relatively young object of about 100,000 years, is still surrounded by its original molecular cloud, or large region of gas and dust. Webb’s earlier observation of L1527, using NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), allowed us to peer into this region, revealing this molecular cloud and protostar in opaque, vivid colors.

Both NIRCam and MIRI show the effects of outflows, which are emitted in opposite directions along the protostar’s rotation axis as the object consumes gas and dust from the surrounding cloud. These outflows take the form of bow shocks into the surrounding molecular cloud, which appear as filamentary structures everywhere.

They are also responsible for carving out the bright hourglass structure in the molecular cloud, as they energize, or excite, the surrounding matter and cause the regions above and below it to glow. This creates an effect reminiscent of fireworks lighting up a cloudy night sky. However, unlike NIRCam, which primarily shows light reflected from dust, MIRI offers a glimpse into how these outflows affect the thickest dust and gases in the region.

The regions colored blue here, which comprise most of the hourglass, show mostly carbon-containing molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The protostar itself and the dense blanket of dust and a mixture of gases surrounding it are shown in red. (The star-like red protrusions are an artifact of the telescope’s optics.)

In between, MIRI reveals a white region directly above and below the protostar, which is not as visible in the NIRCam view. This region is a mixture of hydrocarbons, ionized neon, and thick dust, showing that the protostar is pushing this matter quite far away from itself as it consumes messy material from its disk.

As the protostar ages and releases energetic jets, it will consume, destroy, and push away much of this molecular cloud, and many of the structures we see here will begin to fade away. Eventually, once it has finished accumulating mass, this impressive display will end, and the star itself will become more visible, even to our visible-light telescopes.

The combination of both near-infrared and mid-infrared analyses reveals the overall behavior of this system, including how the central protostar influences the surrounding region. Other stars in Taurus, the star-forming region where L1527 resides, are forming in a similar manner, potentially disrupting other molecular clouds and either preventing the formation of new stars or catalyzing their development.