The Webb Space Telescope is dedicated to imaging space in the infrared and near-infrared, so it’s no surprise that it captures a familiar object in a completely new way.
According to an ESA press release, Webb captured the edge of the protoplanetary disk with unerring precision, capturing the object’s wind and jets. The image is the most recent assessment of Webb’s abilities, which it obtained from a region of space approximately one million miles from Earth.
The protoplanetary disk is actually a Herbig-Garo object, dubbed HH 30. Such objects are luminous regions in space that contain newborn protostars. The newly formed suns spit out jets of gas and blow wind.
If you look at the protoplanetary disk from the side, you can see gas and dust moving away from the nascent star at the very center of the object. Take a look at the map of the Milky Way created by the Gaia spacecraft based on more than three trillion observations, allowing imaging experts to create an accurate up-close image of the galaxy. After completing the mapping of the galaxy, Gaia immediately retired.
The Hubble Space Telescope had previously taken images of the disk, but not at the same resolution as Webb. Hubble still performs an important function by imaging the cosmos in the optical, ultraviolet and some infrared ranges, but Webb is on a different level.
The observations of HH 30 were made as part of a program that determines how dust evolves in such protoplanetary disks. The Webb data were combined with previous Hubble observations and data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to see what the disk looked like at different wavelengths.
But Webb’s infrared image of HH 30 is just one view of the object that the stunning space observatory has produced; it has also imaged the disk in visible, near-infrared, and mid-infrared light, as shown below. The other image – where the disk appears as a thin reddish line – was taken by ALMA.
The colored lines sticking out of the center of the object (both above and below it, if you look closely) are jets of matter. The disk itself is a narrow dark band of dust separating the luminous blue-green parts of the object. In the lower left corner of the image, a blue tail extends from the object to the lower left corner.
Images like this help scientists understand the extreme conditions in which planets are born from the aether surrounding young stars. By continuing to observe such objects, Webb will help us better understand how different exoplanets form and how our solar system – and our own world – came to be.
