NASA’s Webb captures celestial fireworks around forming star

The cosmos appears to come alive with a crackling burst 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 at the neck of the hourglass, accreting material from a thin protoplanetary disk, seen as a dark line.

The protostar, a relatively young object of about 100,000 years, is still surrounded by its parent molecular cloud, or large region of gas and dust. Webb’s previous observation of L1527, with the NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera), allowed us to peer into this region and revealed this molecular cloud and protostar in dark, vivid colors.

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

They are also responsible for carving out the luminous hourglass structure within the molecular cloud, as they energize or excite the surrounding matter and cause the areas above and below it to glow. This creates an effect reminiscent of fireworks lighting up a cloudy night sky. However, unlike NIRCam, which mostly shows light reflected off dust, MIRI provides a look at how these emissions affect the region’s coarser dust and gases.

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

In between, MIRI reveals a white area directly above and below the protostar, which does not show up as strongly in the NIRCam view. This region is a mixture of hydrocarbons, ionized neon, and coarse dust, indicating that the protostar pushes this material far away from it as it erratically consumes material from its disk.

As the protostar continues to age and emit energetic jets, it will consume, destroy, and dislodge much of this molecular cloud, and many of the structures we see here will begin to fade. Eventually, once it finishes accreting mass, this impressive display will end and the star itself will become more visible, even to our visible light telescopes.

Combining analyzes from both near-infrared and mid-infrared images reveal the overall behavior of this system, including how the central protostar is affecting the surrounding region. Other stars in Taurus, the star-forming region where L1527 resides, are forming just like this one, which could lead to the disruption of other molecular clouds and either prevent new stars from forming or catalyze their development.