In honor of Independence Day, NASA has released an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that shows the violent outburst of a young star in bright red, white and blue.
The cosmic fireworks come from the nebula L1527, located 460 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
Shaped like an hourglass or butterfly wings, the image shows a 100,000-year-old baby star roaring to life in a cloud of gas. The star is spinning in place, consuming material on its sides as it ejects it in huge jets from both poles.
“This fiery hourglass marks the scene of a very young object in the process of becoming a star,” NASA wrote in a statement. “A central protostar is growing in the neck of the hourglass, accreting material from a thin protoplanetary disk, which is seen edge-on as a dark line.”
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Stars can take tens of millions of years to form. They grow from billowing clouds of turbulent dust and gas into gently glowing protostars, before expanding into giant balls of fusion-fueled plasma.
As stars come to life, they eject material in the form of winds and jets of ionized plasma, a process known as stellar feedback.
The gas surrounding the young star is usually dark, but the star’s outflow produces shock waves in the gas, causing it to glow. The blue-colored region shows carbon-based molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
To capture the image, NASA used the powerful Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope.
The JWST also imaged the protostar in the near-infrared spectrum, with its outflows showing the orange hues of a spectacular cosmic sunset.