The rare and short-lived explosion of a pair of baby stars has been immortalised in a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The binary star and its explosion are called Herbig-Haro 46/47 and belong to a class of some of the most spectacular objects in the Milky Way. Known as Herbig-Haro objects, they are certainly beautiful, but they are also scientifically very valuable because they can help us understand the formation process of baby stars.

The formation of a Herbig-Haro object requires a specific set of components. The formation process begins with a baby star, known as a protostar, which is still in the formation stage.

Protostars form when denser clumps in an already dense cloud of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity and begin to spin. As they spin, they take more mass from the cloud around them.

Astronomers believe that some of this material does not reach the star. Instead, it is blown along the magnetic field lines around the protostar's outer circumference and accelerates towards the poles. When it reaches the poles, it is ejected as a collimated jet at high speeds. This is very similar to the process by which active black holes eject jets.

The protostar jets can then pierce the surrounding cloud material, and the incredibly high temperatures convert this material into plasma. This produces two glowing lobes on either side of the protostar, still shrouded by a thick torus of dust and gas.

So you get these glowing bits of nebulosity erupting from a dark, dusty blob.

JWST's infrared sensitivity means it can look through the dust because infrared light doesn't scatter as it does at other wavelengths. So by looking inside these dusty knots, the telescope can give us a closer look at the baby stars inside.

HH 46/47 is only a few thousand years old; stars take millions of years to form, so the binary star is just getting started. JWST's new image shows two orange lobes from an earlier outburst, centred around a glowing orange-white spot. Here are the stars here, in thick birth clouds.

A more recent outburst is visible at the 2 o'clock diffraction spike as threads of a more delicate blue. And the pale blue lace-like material around the whole structure is a dark nebula that often looks like a shadow speck in the sky. Here, it has been made transparent to JWST's infrared eye so that we can see more distant stars and galaxies.

The jets of a baby star are thought to be crucial to the growth of a star. They will gradually help the cloud around it to explode, preventing the star from growing further, but allowing the fully grown object to shine freely in deep space.

 

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/