On the cover of this week’s international academic journal ‘Nature’, the phrase “A star is born” is written in large letters. Below it is written, “The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed the molecular properties of jets (gas) ejected by protostars.”
The cover image features a near-infrared composite image of ‘Herbig-Haro 211’ taken by NASA’s JWST. This is a beautiful interstellar jet emitted from a young star in the molecular cloud of Perseus, about 1,000 light-years from Earth.
A paper examining this image by Professor Tom Ray Ireland’s research team in the Department of Physics at Trinity University was published in Nature on August 24, and was published as a cover paper in Nature this week.
The protostar that gave rise to Herbig-Haro 211 is analyzed to be similar to the Sun ‘tens of thousands of years ago’. As it is presumed to have gone through evolutionary stages like the sun, future spectroscopic studies on this protostar are expected to provide insight into how the solar system was formed.
Herbig-Haro 211 is a phenomenon that occurs in the early stages of star formation. Because young stars appear in the process of evolving into stars like the Sun, they serve as a means of solving mysteries about the solar system. Because young stars acquire most of their mass early on, observing the material and flow emitted from Herbig-Haro 211 can provide information about the growth process of young stars.
Through this paper, the research team also discovered that, contrary to the research team’s expectations, Herbig-Haro 211 is mostly composed of molecules rather than atoms and ions. This is believed to be because the shock waves around young stars do not yet have enough power to split molecules into atoms.
