If you've ever wondered what our sun looked like in its early days, NASA may finally have the answer. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a distant star in its infancy and believe it will grow up to be like our sun.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in 2021 and will begin operation in July 2022. It has taken countless stunning photos and made many incredible discoveries. From new detailed observations of nearby planets like Jupiter, to watching asteroid redirection tests and even taking selfies. The vast array of technologies included in JWST also allows it to identify what resources exist on moons and planets hundreds of light-years away.
However, one of JWST's latest discoveries is closer to Earth than you might think. NASA used this telescope to discover an infant star, commonly known as a protostar, in the constellation Perseus, about 1,000 light-years away from Earth. The star is currently in its Category 0 protostar stage, which means it is less than 100,000 years old.
When a star is in its budding stages, it doesn't look like what you usually imagine. A protostar is not a glowing and burning sphere of gas like we see on the Sun, it is usually seen as a dark void accompanied by a mass known as a Herbig-Haro (HH) object. HH objects are collections of gas flowing from infant stars that collide with other gas and dust in the vacuum of space, producing bright colors.
This HH object, classified as HH211, can be seen in its wild hues of blue and pink as gas is being shed by the young star. This gas will likely continue to be expelled from the star until shortly before it enters the next protostellar stage, Class I, in the distant future. At that point, the star will begin to glow and melt, just as our sun has done for billions of years.
NASA describes the star and its HH object as "infant analogues of our Sun from tens of thousands of years ago." Currently, it has only 8% the mass of our sun, but over time it will grow into a star as large as the sun.
In just over a year of operation, NASA appears to have gotten value for money from JWST. Without its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, discoveries like the one here would be much more difficult, if not impossible. With so many outstanding returns in such a short period of time, it’s hard to imagine any more exciting discoveries from JWST in the near future.