NASA releases new image of newborn star: NPR

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image of a newborn star that reveals what Earth’s sun may have looked like when it was just tens of thousands of years old.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

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ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image of a newborn star that reveals what Earth’s sun may have looked like when it was just tens of thousands of years old.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

Have you ever wondered what the Sun looked like in its early days?

A new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has shown what Earth’s sun looked like when it was just a few tens of thousands of years old.

The image of Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), released by NASA on September 14, shows the emergence of a young star. “An infantile analogue of our Sun,” NASA said in a statement.

Located about 1,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, HH21 has only about 8% of the mass of the Sun. A class 0 protostar, meaning the nascent star is less than 100,000 years old, “will eventually become a star like the Sun,” the Webb Space Telescope wrote on its website.

This stunning high-resolution image, with shades of blue and pink bursting from a dark center, shows the bright region surrounding the newborn star, known as the Herbig-Haro object. When the new star ejects jets of gas, these winds collide with nearby gas and dust, producing the colorful outflow we see in the image.

On X (formerly Twitter), HH211’s image inspired different interpretations from viewers.

“like stretching when I wake up from a nap”, a user commented on a NASA article on infrared imaging.

“It looks a bit like the jet from a science fiction particle cannon.” wrote another.

According to NASA, newborn stars are “invariably still embedded in the gas of the molecular cloud in which they formed,” making them difficult to document. However, Webb’s sensitive infrared instruments make it a powerful tool for recording these celestial bodies.

You can download a high resolution image of the HH211 here.