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.
You asked for SETI and I gave it. You asked for NASA and I gave it. You asked for JWST and I gave it.
In your disbelief. You pretend these records do not exist. Let's face facts. Your beliefs derive from having unquestioningly accepted what others said and you are unwilling to admit it.
Otherwise, you would have offered proof rather than constantly referring to the absolute number of stars and planets believed to be in the universe.
I'm not trying to talk down, I think we all have areas where we accept statements by others without question.
What I believe is that life as we know it is not nearly as common as the Carl Sagan types claim it to be based in large part on my own study of the scientific information some of which I have given examples of.
If life as we know it exists out there, it is nowhere near as common as the Carl Sagan types claim it to be and I have no evidence suggesting that we earthlings are not the most advanced lifeform as science presently understands life.
As for the possibility of lifeforms science presently does not recognize, that is a different topic. Some have suggested silicon based life but such theories are not well accepted. Persistent reports through the ages of craft and beings seemingly able to defy known laws of physics also should be lumped into this category of lifeforms unrecognized by modern science.
All that having been said, this discussion has reached a point where I think we should accept that we have differing views and move on.
I do not believe I ever denied the possibility of life as we know it existing elsewhere. I just deny the assumed ubiquity of life as we know it existing throughout the universe based on very large numbers popularized by the Carl Sagan types as if each planet is equally capable of supporting life as we know it.
Let's just accept that we have different views and move on.
Yes
Well there ya go! And we agree!
Welcome to the club!
Fine but we are light years apart on how common life as science knows it may be.
Not sure what that means but thanks.
Like the rest of humanity, I have no idea how common life forms might be in the universe.
You’re welcome!
(and as if by magic...)
U.S. astrophysicist Frank Drake's GREENBANK FORMULA is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.
N = R*fpneflfifcL
Only believe half of what you see, and nothing of what you hear.
We aren't even the most advanced carbon based life form on THIS PLANET.
The trillions is just in our local galaxy cluster. The universe is not really subject to such a measurement. We have a word for expressing the scale of Universe. Infinite.
However, none of us truly can visualize what Infinite looks like. We have no experience with Infinity that we can apply to the measure of the Universe and the things in it.
Trying to visualize infinity is like visualizing a piece of string with one end. ☺
That there is interesting. Please help me out.
Help me out. How does one reconcile the Big Bang with an infinite universe? Perhaps the universe is expanding but there is a limit to how much expansion has taken place since the Big Bang.
They're just theories. Btw, a few of their theories once commonly accepted by many regarding the origin of the universe, have been smoked since JWST went on line. Great stuff!
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