Webb’s infrared camera peers through dust clouds, enabling discovery. Rice University astronomer Megan Reiter and colleagues took a “deep dive” into one of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and were rewarded with the discovery of telltale signs from two dozen previously unseen
Matter flows away from the poles of newborn stars in fast-moving columns that plow through nebular clouds. Gas and dust pile up in front of these outflows, forming waves called “bow shocks” in much the same way that bow waves form at the leading edge of seagoing ships. This false-color infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows bow shocks of molecular hydrogen streaming away from newborn stars in a star-forming region called the Cosmic Cliffs in the southern constellation Carina.
Reiter and colleagues focused their attention on a portion of NGC 3324 where only a few young stars had previously been found. By analyzing a specific infrared wavelength, 4.7 microns, they discovered two dozen previously unknown outflows of molecular hydrogen from young stars. The outflows range in size, but many appear to come from protostars that will eventually become low-mass stars like Earth’s sun.
Within their first 10,000 years, newborn stars gather material from the gas and dust around them. Most young stars eject a fraction of that material back into space via jets that stream out in opposite directions from their poles. Dust and gas pile up in front of the jets, which clear paths through nebular clouds like snowplows. One vital ingredient for baby stars, molecular hydrogen, gets swept up by these jets and is visible in Webb’s infrared images.
Study co-author Jon Morse of the California Institute of Technology said jets like those discovered in the study “are only visible when you embark on that deep dive — dissecting data from each of the different filters and analyzing each area alone.Reiter said the size of the Webb telescope also played a role in the discovery.
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