A dark hourglass-like nebula photographed by the Web Space Telescope sorae portal site to the universe

This is a dark nebula about 460 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Taurus.「L1527」he is. A pair of glowing orange, pink and blue sectors create an hourglass shape.

According to the US Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which released the image, the hourglass constriction (aperture) is only about 100,000 years old.the original starExisting. Its mass is estimated to be 20 to 40 percent of that of the Sun, and it is believed that the hydrogen nuclear fusion reaction, which is the star’s energy source, has not yet begun. The hourglass depicted by L1527 appears to be associated with this protostar.

prostar isProtoplanetary diskIt is surrounded by a disk-like structure made of gas and dust called the γ, and the light from the star can only leak in the upper and lower directions that are not surrounded by the disk. In the vertical direction of the disk, the cavity is formed by the material emitted by the protostar, and by illuminating this cavity with light escaping up and down, an hourglass-like shape emerges.

Also, since we are looking at L1527’s protoplanetary disk from the side, we can also see a dark line in the contraction of the hourglass that indicates the presence of a disk. According to STScI, the disk of L1527 is roughly the same size as our solar system. The solar system at that time, which formed about 4.6 billion years ago, might look like this.

photo at the beginningJames WebbIt was created based on images obtained with the space telescope’s “Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam)” and released by STScI on November 16, 2022. Because the Webb Space Telescope primarily observes infrared wavelengths that the eye cannot To be seen by humans, the images are colored and superimposed according to the four types of filters used for image acquisition (F200W: blue, F335M: green, F444W: red, F470N: orange).

Connection:It’s like looking at the night sky from another planet. Dwarf galaxy stars imaged by the Webb Space Telescope

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• Image credit: Science: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image processing: Joseph DiPasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Anton M Cockeymore (STScI)
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Text / Takehiro Matsumura