NASA's Webb Space Telescope captures 'cosmic hourglass', as new star forms
NASA officials shared one of the last images from James Webb. The image shows "cosmic hourglass" called L1527 cloud and the light emitted by a star just forming.
WASHINGTON, US - (TechtUSA) NASA officials shared the latest image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) during the House of Representatives subcommittee meeting. The Webb telescope captured an image of a dark cloud called L1527 and a protostar at its core.
L1527 is distanced approximately 460 light-years away from Earth and 0.3 light-years wide. It has a protostar at its centre. Very young stars that are still forming are called protostars.
The cloud has previously been imaged by the Spitzer Space Telescope and the ALMA radio telescope. The distinctive hourglass shape of the L1527 was already known, however, never seen with this resolution achieved by James Webb's Near Infrared camera (NIRCam).
“This first image of this protostar with JWST shows that, while the protostar itself is hidden, within the neck of this hourglass shape, you see a protoplanetary disk—there’s a dark line across the middle of the neck,” Mark Clampin, the Astrophysics Division Director NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, stated to subcommittee.
“To the top and the bottom, you see light from the protostar illuminating the cavities within the surrounding outflows of gas and dust from this object,” he added.
