Posted on 06/24/2024 11:46:04 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured striking new images of the Serpens Nebula that reveal a rare alignment of stellar jets, offering new insights into the formation of stars.
Protostellar outflows occur when high-speed jets of hot gas produced by young stars collide with surrounding dust and gases. In the new Webb images, several outflows spotted in the northern area of the Serpens Nebula appear to all be aligned and oriented in the same direction.
Located around 1,300 light-years from Earth, the Serpens Nebula is a dense cluster of young stars, some of which are only about 100,000 years old. This region is also home to discoveries that include the “Bat Shadow,” observed in 2020 data from Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
According to Klaus Pontoppidan, principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the alignment of these outflows in the new images obtained with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is a phenomenon that astronomers have anticipated for years.
“Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction,” Pontoppidan said in a statement.
“However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born.”
Above: New imagery of the Serpens Nebula obtained by Webb’s NIRCam reveal the presence of aligned protostellar outflows, visible in the upper left corner of the image above as red streaks (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA-JPL), Joel Green (STScI)).
Interstellar gas clouds begin to spin rapidly as they collapse and begin to form into stars. When this occurs, the only way for gases to continue moving inward is to remove some of their spin. This process gives rise to the disk of material that forms around young stars, in which magnetic fields located in the inner region of the disk project some of the stellar material outward in opposite directions.
These jets can be seen in the new Webb images, appearing as bright streaks with reddish coloration (indicating molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide) caused by shockwaves produced as the jets strike the surrounding gases and dust.
“This area of the Serpens Nebula – Serpens North – only comes into clear view with Webb,” said Joel Green, lead author from the Space Telescope Science Institute. “We’re now able to catch these extremely young stars and their outflows, some of which previously appeared as just blobs or were completely invisible in optical wavelengths because of the thick dust surrounding them.”
There may be more than one mechanism behind what can potentially shift the direction of stellar outflows during the early stages of a star’s life. Binary stars are one possibility that can shape the direction of outflows as they spin around one another.
Future research will involve the use of Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to study the chemical composition of the cloud, allowing astronomers to analyze the volatile compounds present within them. Such information, when compared with current data obtained in studies involving protoplanetary disks, could provide key insights into the origins of these compounds.
Pontoppidian says that studying these volatiles is significant because all life on Earth originates from matter that stems from such compounds.
“The majority of water here on Earth originated when the Sun was an infant protostar billions of years ago,” Pontoppidian says. “Looking at the abundance of these critical compounds in protostars just before their protoplanetary disks have formed could help us understand how unique the circumstances were when our own solar system formed.”
The initial results of this study have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
Webb Ping!........................
Excellent work...
That’s all fine but when will we see pictures of the exoplanets showing evidence of life that we were promised would more than justify the massive cost and schedule overruns?
Not sure who promised you evidence of life, but ya might want to give it some more time. The universe is really a big place.
In NASA's own words from a 2016 crawl stored by the Wayback machine:
"Data from JWST will be used to study the formation and evolution of habitable worlds, and will be invaluable in understanding processes that have shaped habitability in our own Solar System. JWST is capable of making detailed observations that might allow astrobiologists to identify signatures of life on Earth-like planets beyond our Solar System."
https://web.archive.org/web/20160703200716/https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/missions/jwst/
The media and their scientific sources, scientific publications, the SETI cult, etc.
No, I don’t think scientist or the people that developed and operate JWST promised you that evidence. It has been discussed, but never promised.
Btw, on another note, I won’t be surprised if life in some form is discovered to exist outside earth within the next 10 years. We’ll see.
Perhaps but what fundamentally gives you that confidence?
The shear numbers, which makes for unlimited possibilities.
But those numbers reduce profoundly when one starts considering things like the type star earth has and how uncommon stars like ours are believed to be in the universe.
Finding a star like our sun is not enough because it has to be within the habitable zone of a galaxy. This criteria then wipes out a vast swath of stars in each galaxy.
It doesn't appear that any of the known exoplanets exist in solar systems resembling our own and the composition of our solar system with gas giants in the outer belts trapping interstellar debris is important for life on earth. This then brings up the possibility that our type solar system is itself uncommon which further reduces the probabilities.
On and on the reducing factors go.
There are many, many more reducing factors which Carl Sagan had to know of when he spewed his billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars. reasoning for the probability of life out there.
“””Finding a star like our sun is not enough”””
We might not have to find anything. There’s a good chance it may find us. 🙂
Actual imagery.
The staple of SciFi is that extraterrestrials are more advanced than earthlings. Guess it doesn't make for good books, tv and movies if we Earthlings are the most advanced in the universe, or even the only one.
Humans are so arrogant. I don't consider humans advanced at all. We can't even put a human on our closest planet which in astronomical terms is literally sitting on our lap. We can't even cure common diseases which have existed thousands of years. We're talking about a species that routinely murders each other by the thousands.
Advanced? C'mon.
Ok but as compared with what/who?
There are multiple *trillions* of planets in the universe...Man has not scratched the surface in it's search because we're not capable. Man is primitive. Yet we're declaring life probably doesn't exist because we've look at a few hundred systems? C'mon.
Don’t need to compare. Do you think a species that routinely murders each other, can’t cure common diseases that have been with us thousands of years, and can’t even put a person on our closest planet are advanced? Really?
That's theory but reasonable. Time and better instrumentation will reveal more exoplanets. I share your faith in that.
Never-the-less, citing absolute numbers is very misleading.
There is a long list of factors which dramatically reduce the number of exoplanets that might be out there capable of supporting life as we know it. Then there is another long list of unknowns concerning how life as we know it might have first begun in a sterile environment.
It should tell you something that no scientist popular with the media will address those reducing factors. This is no different from no scientist popular with the media coming out and saying my natural gas appliances, gas lawn tools and gas automobile are not causing global warming.
Man is primitive.
As compared with who/what?
Yet we're declaring life probably doesn't exist because we've look at a few hundred systems? C'mon.
No, just that life as we know it is sufficiently unlikely and poorly understood that odds are against us finding it anytime soon... if ever.
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