NASA’s James Webb captures the once hidden beginning of a young star only 100,000 years old.

NASAThe James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured the “once-hidden” start of a very young star during its exploration to search for the first galaxies.

An image of this never-before-seen protostar shows an hourglass shape that looks like it’s burning in the midst of the blackness of space, visible only in infrared light.

JWST is the only telescope with this capability.

Using the infrared camera (NIRCam), Webb was able to not only penetrate the dark cloud that hid protostars from telescopes in the past, but also look back in time to see when a young star is feeding on a cloud of material to grow in size.

NASA shared a surprising image on Wednesday, noting that this view of the protostar, dubbed L1527, “provides a window into what our Sun and solar system looked like a child.”

An image of this protostar shows an hourglass shape that looks like it's burning in the midst of the blackness of space, visible only in infrared light.  The image, which looks like an explosion in space, shows the once invisible dust and clouds surrounding the region, with a young star only 100,000 years old at the center of the hourglass.

An image of this protostar shows an hourglass shape that looks like it’s burning in the midst of the blackness of space, visible only in infrared light. The image, which looks like an explosion in space, shows the once invisible dust and clouds surrounding the region, with a young star only 100,000 years old at the center of the hourglass.

How does James Webb see the past?

The farther away the object, the farther in time we look.

This is due to the fact that light takes time to get from the object to us.

With James Webb’s large mirror, he will be able to see almost all the way to the beginning of the universe, more than 13.5 billion years ago.

With the ability to see the universe in longer wavelength infrared light, James Webb will be able to see some of the most distant galaxies in our universe, of course, with greater ease than Hubble’s visible/ultraviolet light.

This is because light from distant objects is being stretched due to the expansion of our universe — an effect known as redshift — pushing light out of the visible range and into the infrared.

NIRCam is the first camera of its kind that allows JWST to detect cosmic features that previous telescopes missed.

This is because it is designed to capture near- and mid-infrared wavelengths, meaning light beyond the red end of the spectrum.

This technology is “key to observing the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang and to achieve all the scientific goals of the telescope,” Alison Nordt, director of space science and instrumentation at Lockheed Martin, which developed and built the technology, said in an earlier statement. .

The image, which looks like an explosion in space, shows the once invisible dust and clouds surrounding the region, with a young star only 100,000 years old at the center of the hourglass.

This is compared to most, which range in age from one billion to 10 billion years.

The most surprising features are the blue and orange clouds that form when matter flies out of a protostar and collides with surrounding matter.

“The colors themselves are due to layers of dust between Webb and the clouds,” NASA said in a statement.

“The blue areas are where the dust is the thinnest. The thicker the layer of dust, the less blue light can escape, creating patches of orange.”

Since the protostar is very young, NASA classifies it as a class 0, which is the earliest stage of star formation, and this star still has a long way to go before it sheds its dark cloud of dust and gas and blooms into a full-fledged star. star.

And unlike mature stars, this protostar does not yet generate its own energy through nuclear fusion, which is an essential characteristic of stars.

Its shape, mostly spherical, is also unstable, taking the form of a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the mass of Earth’s Sun.

“As the protostar continues to gain mass, its core is gradually shrinking and moving closer to stable nuclear fusion,” NASA says.

“The scene shown in this image shows the L1527 doing just that. The surrounding molecular cloud is made up of dense dust and gas, which are attracted to the center where the protostar resides. ‘

NASA goes on to explain that as this material falls inward, it spirals around the central hourglass-shaped region, which creates a dense disk of material known as an accretion disk – and this is what feeds material to the protostar.

NASA's James Webb is the only telescope capable of seeing in infrared light, allowing it to observe never-before-seen objects in space.  Here is the telescope in 2017, a few years before its launch last year.

NASA’s James Webb is the only telescope capable of seeing in infrared light, allowing it to observe never-before-seen objects in space. Here is the telescope in 2017, a few years before its launch last year.

As it gains more mass and shrinks further, the temperature of its core will rise, eventually reaching the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin and embarking on its epic journey towards a full-fledged star.

JWST, which was launched from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana on December 25 last year, will probe the universe in infrared, allowing it to look through clouds of gas and dust where stars are born.

In comparison, its predecessor, Hubble, has operated primarily in the optical and ultraviolet ranges since its launch in 1990.

As the universe expands, light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths in which it was emitted to longer infrared wavelengths.

Astronomers will use the JWST to observe the infrared universe, analyze the collected data, and publish scientific articles about their discoveries.