Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a bright cloud of material surrounding the newborn star, trapped in a lintel of gas and dust.
These so-called Herbig halo objects are created when stellar winds and jets of gas blow out from a newborn star, causing a shock wave that slams into the gas and dust from which the star was born at high speed.
This particular Herbig halo object, designated HH 797, can be seen occupying the bottom half of this stunning new JWST image taken with the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. A stellar “cocoon” is located around her 1,000 pieces of light. – Several years away, near the young open cluster IC 348, itself located at the eastern edge of the Perseids.
Related: Stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope show young stars ejecting supersonic jets
Infrared instruments like NIRCam are ideal for studying young stars and probing Herbig halo objects. That’s because these bodies are often surrounded by remnants of the gas and dust that formed them in the first place, which absorbs or blocks other wavelengths of light emitted by these stars. is.
On the other hand, infrared light can shine through these cocoons. By peering into newborn stars with her NIRCam, JWST reveals molecules heated to thousands of degrees by impact collisions, allowing astronomers to determine the structure of the effluent from newborn stars. Did.
HH 797 has been extensively studied with ground-based telescopes, and previous observations show that its gas is moving away from Earth, becoming wavelength-stretched or “redshifted” in the south, while gas in the north is “blueshifting.” It has been shown to be moving towards Earth. Earth (the expansion of the universe stretches the wavelengths of light passing through it, moving it toward the “red” or low-frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum). Astronomers also found that the gas in the eastern edge of HH 797 is more redshifted than the gas in the western edge.
This variation was previously thought to be due to the rotation of HH 797’s gas outflow. However, the high resolution of the JWST images revealed that what was thought to be an outflow was actually two parallel jets, each causing its own series of shocks. This could explain the asymmetry in gas velocity around HH 797.
The source of these twins is in the dark cavity on the right side of the image. The dual nature of the outflow suggests that not one but two stars are located within this dark bubble.