New Webb image of sun-like stars reveals

A stunning new image of sun-like stars has been born on July 12 by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which marked a year of discovery by NASA jets of red gas bursting into the cosmos. The picture is of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the planet's closest star nursery, whose proximity to Earth allows for a crisp close-up by the most powerful orbital observatory ever built. In just a year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity's view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time, said NASA administrator Bill Nelson. Webb's image reveals around 50 young stars, of similar mass to our Sun or smaller. Some have the distinctive shadows of circumstellar disks a sign that planets may eventually form around them. Large jets of hydrogen appear horizontally in the upper third of the image and vertically on the right. These occur when a star bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, first launching a pair of competing jets into space as a newborn first stretching her arms into the world, the U.S. space agency said in a statement. You can see a young star that's energetic enough that it blows a bubble in the cloud of dust and gas from which it was born, said Christine Chen, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb. It does so by a combination of its light and a stellar wind linked to it, she said. The raw material of stars and planets is found in interstellar space, which is filled with gas and dust. Webb's image of Rho Ophiuchi gives us a chance to observe a very brief period in the galaxy's life cycle with new clarification. Our own sun experienced a phase like this long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another stars story, said Webb project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan. Webb was launched from French Guiana in December 2021, on a 1.5 million-kilometer voyage to a region called the second Lagrange point. Its first full-color picture was revealed by President Joe Biden on July 11, 2022, the clearest view yet of the early universe, going back 13 billion years. The next wave included mountain and valleys of a star-forming region, dubbed the Cosmic Cliffs, in the Carina Nebula, and a grouping of five galaxies bound in a celestial dance called Stephans Quintet. Webb's primary mirror, which measures over 6.5 meters, is made up of 18 hexagonal, gold-plated segments, as well as a five-layered sunshield that covers the size of a tennis court. Unlike its predecessor, Hubble operates primarily in the infrared spectrum, enabling it to view back toward the Earth and to better penetrate dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are being formed today. A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first galaxies formed, revealing at unprecedented resolution the atmosphere compositions of planets outside our solar system and, in our own neck of the woods, stunning new views of the planet Jupiter. A 20-year mission is possible, and Webb has enough fuel for a promising new era of astronomy. It will soon be joined in orbit by Europe's Euclid space telescope, launched on July 1 on a mission to shed light on two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.