2023-07-27 20:33:00
The James Webb Telescope continues to capture impressive images of different space phenomena. This week, NASA highlighted two events that should add to studies on the workings of the universe —a detailed capture of infrared images of stars in formation and the presence of water vapor accompanying the gestation of rocky planets 370 light-years away.
In the first case, released by the space agency last Wednesday (26), it is possible to follow the pair of young stars called Herbig-Haro 46/47 (image below). They are buried deep in a disk of gas and dust that fuels their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions that surround the central stars.
The most striking detail is the two-sided lobes that fan out from central stars in active formation, depicted in fiery orange. Much of this material was expelled from these stars as they repeatedly ingest and eject the gas and dust that immediately surround them over thousands of years.
The stars are 1,470 light-years away in the constellation Vela. Discoveries like these provide scientists with information about how much mass stars accumulate over time, potentially allowing them to model it like our own Sun.
In the other case, the insights come from the PDS 70 planetary system. New measurements from a James Webb device have detected water vapor in the system’s inner disk, at distances of less than 160 million kilometers from the star —where rocky planets can be found. forming.
This is the first detection of water in the Earth region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets. PDS 70 is a K-type star, cooler than the Sun, and has an estimated age of 5.4 million years. This is considered ancient on the scale of stars with planet-forming disks, which made the discovery of water vapor surprising.
Scientists now wonder where the water was coming from. There are two hypotheses: one is that water molecules are forming where we detect them, as hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine; the other is that ice-covered dust particles are being transported from the cold outer disk to the hot inner disk, where the water ice sublimates and turns to steam.
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