JWST Catches a Protostar in the Act

On the heels of that amazingly successful Artemis-1 launch to the Moon, the JWST teams have just dropped an amazing image of a protostar. It’s an infrared view of the object L1527, which is a dark cloud of gas and dust with a future star just starting to form inside.

As you look at the image, you can see some pretty interesting features. The protostar is hidden at the center and the cloud of gas and dust it’s buried in is about the size of our solar system. The object is lighting up the clouds of gas and dust stretching away from it. Amazingly, you can also see caverns and filaments inside the cloud. Those are all regions where the material being ejected from the newborn star is sculpting the cloud.

Now, this protostar is pretty young—maybe only about 100,000 years old. It’s not actually a fully-fledged star yet. That’s going to take some time before nuclear fusion ignites at its core. Before that happens, materials in the thick birth cloud will continue to coalesce toward the center. They’re drawn by the gravity of the forming star.

As the material falls in, it creates a dense accretion disk that will keep feeding the infant star. As it gains more mass and compresses further, the temperature at the protostar’s core will rise. Eventually, things will get hot enough and the pressure high enough that nuclear fusion will ignite.

A Star Is Born (or Will Be)

So, in a few tens of thousands or a million years, this area of the sky will welcome a new star. The cool thing is that there are a lot more places like this in the galaxy for JWST to study. That means a lot more data for astronomers to study as they seek to understand the process of star birth.

JWST is the latest of the world’s space telescopes to take its turn showing us the universe, particularly in infrared wavelengths. Its first images of the distant universe began flowing back to Earth for analysis earlier this year.

Read more about this image and its details here.

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