Posted on 07/13/2023 9:25:34 AM PDT by Red Badger
A closeup of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, imaged by JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Pontoppidan/STScI, A. Pagan/STScI)
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A glittering treasure trove of baby stars hidden in the thick dust of their nursery is revealed in a stunning new image from the James Webb Space Telescope.
To celebrate its first successful year of operations, the JWST has turned its honeycomb eye to the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex some 390 light-years away, peering through the thick shroud to the bright star formation occurring therein.
It's one of the things at which the telescope truly excels, its infrared vision detecting the long wavelengths of light that can travel through dust clouds to show us sights the human eye could never see unaided.
"Webb's image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clarity," says astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
"Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another's star's story."
JWST's new image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud star-forming complex. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Pontoppidan/STScI, A. Pagan/STScI) Although the Milky Way is not particularly bursting with star formation – it churns out up to a relatively lazy 8 solar masses' worth of new stars per year – there's life in the old thing yet. Regions where stars form are called stellar nurseries, and historically they have been pretty difficult to study. That's because stars are born from dense clumps in clouds of dust and gas that accumulate enough mass to create the core pressure and heat required to ignite fusion.
All that dust and gas prevents most wavelengths of light from emerging, forcing them to scatter from the mix of particles in the cloud. Infrared light is the exception; and, as the most powerful infrared telescope ever built, the JWST is helping demystify the star formation process.
You can see how dense and impenetrable these clouds can be in an optical image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex compiled from Digitized Sky Survey 2 data. By comparison, the JWST image reveals a dynamic, complicated region of space, glowing brightly with infrared light as jets from newborn stars punch into the dust, carving out space.
Digitized Sky Survey 2 image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. The new JWST image is of that small patch in the center. (ESO/DSS2) The new image shows a region in which 50 stars, the size of the Sun or smaller, can be found.
"The darkest areas are the densest, where thick dust cocoons still-forming protostars. Huge red bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen dominate the image, appearing horizontally across the upper third and vertically on the right," explains the ESA in a statement.
"These occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets into space. In contrast, the star S1 has carved out a glowing cave of dust in the lower half of the image. It is the only star in the image that is significantly more massive than the Sun."
VIDEO AT LINK..............
Already, the JWST has changed the way we see the Universe. From our own Solar System, to the broader Milky Way galaxy and beyond, to the very farthest reaches of space and time, there's never been a better time to be excited about the sky.
You can download wallpaper-sized versions of the new image on the ESA website.
https://esawebb.org/images/weic2316a/
https://cdn.esawebb.org/archives/images/screen/weic2316a.jpg
Webb PING!...................
Baby stars, doot doo do doot do dooh...
Child endangerment alert...
These newborn’s photos could lead to the stars being kidnapped or undergoing a late term abortion...
I hate that song........................
Millions of years from now, these new stars will have drifted apart, the dust will clear a bit and by that time many of these will have planets. Such worlds can never know night was we do -- with that many luminous sources nearby, even through the remaining haze of the molecular cloud from which they spawned, at their darkest it would be akin to a cloudy day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson took a bit more optimistic, if a bit cynical view on it:
"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore."
GREAT STORY!! One of his very best ...
There was a movie, but not very good.................I’d love to see it remade using modern CGI.................
I agree ... the movie sucked wet mud turtles ...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095738/
The movie was so-so.
There are at least four movies by the same name. Titles can’t be copyrighted...........
So I heard. I never saw it. Hey, that might be a fun project to do in a generative AI such as Imagen or the Make-A-Video front-end for DALLE-2.
I wonder what Mr. Asimov and Mr. Silverberg would think of that.
Psalm 8.
Send me $50 bucks and I’ll name one for ya. Neat certificate and everything.
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