NASA Shares Image Showing Birth Of Sun-like Stars Clicked By James Webb Space Telescope

Image Showing Birth Of Sun-like Stars: To mark one year of discoveries made by the world’s biggest telescope, “James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)”, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shared an image captured by James Webb Space Telescope, showcasing the birth of Sun-like stars located 390 light-years away.

The image shows a close-up of Rho Ophiuchi, the closest star-forming region to Earth. Rho Ophiuchi contains approximately 50 young stars, all of them similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller.

Webb’s detailed closeup showcases the chaos of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, where crisscrossing jets from young sunlike stars hit interstellar gas and cause it to glow. Some of the stars are wreathed in shadows that hint at circumstellar disks, the swirling rings of gas and dust where planets are born, says cnn.com.

“Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clarity. Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another’s star’s story,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland and research scientist at NASA, in a statement as reported by cnn.com.

James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, allowing it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope enabling investigations across many fields of astronomy and cosmology.

The telescope is named after James E. Webb, who was the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968 during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

It was launched on 25 December 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana.