Nasa celebrates James Webb telescope with stunning image of star birth

2023-07-15 23:05:11
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Created: 07/15/2023, 19:00

By: Christoph Gschossmann

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The James Webb Telescope has been providing fascinating impressions from space for a year. Nasa is celebrating this with a special image of a star birth.

Munich – For a year now, the James Webb Space Telescope has been providing mankind with the most impressive images from space that have ever existed. To mark this anniversary, the US space agency Nasa celebrated with a particularly stunning example of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex – the closest star-forming region to Earth.

The commemorative image, as NASA writes, shows “star formation like never before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture.” It continues: “Some stars show the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, which is the stuff of future planetary systems.” The “closeness” of 390 light-years allows for a very detailed close-up with no foreground stars in the space in between. Webb’s image shows a region of regarding 50 young stars, all of similar mass to the Sun or smaller. The darkest areas are the densest, where thick dust forms cocoons that still form protostars.

Nasa/James Webb: Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen dominate the picture

Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, shown in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally in the top third and vertically on the right. These occur, according to Nasa, when a star first breaks through its natal shell of cosmic dust and blasts two opposing jets into space, like a newborn baby stretching out its arms into the world for the first time. In contrast, the star “S1” has formed a glowing dust cavity in the lower half of the image. It is the only star in the image that is significantly more massive than the Sun.

Nasa chose this image of a star birth to celebrate the James Webb Telescope. © NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

“Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to experience a very brief period in the stellar life cycle with new clarity. Our own Sun experienced such a phase long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another star’s history,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

James Webb telescope as a “marvel of engineering”

Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson also talks regarding the first year with the super telescope: In just one year it “changed the way humanity sees the cosmos.” Each new image is “a new discovery and gives scientists around the world the opportunity to Asking and answering questions they never dreamed of before”. Thousands of engineers, scientists and leaders “put their life’s passion into this mission, and their efforts will continue to improve our understanding of the origins of the universe — and our place in it.”

Nicola Fox, deputy administrator of NASA’s Directorate of Science Mission in Washington, also hailed Webb as a “marvel of engineering created by the world’s leading scientists and engineers. It has given us a deeper understanding of galaxies, stars and the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system than ever before, laying the foundation for NASA to be a world leader.” Webb is an international program run by NASA with its partners Esa (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Not only through the “James Webb” telescope mankind gets insights into the universe. Old data from NASA’s “Voyager 2” space probe show it: Four of the 27 Uranus moons hide a secret inside. A NASA rover recently discovered a mysterious rock on Mars. (cgsc)

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