NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals what the Sun looked like when it first formed billions of years ago. The telescope recently captured an image of a protostar located 1,000 light-years away, called Herbig-Haro 211 or HH 211.Like the first years of the Sun
As can be seen, HH 211 is at the very beginning of its formation and is still busy accumulating mass. Therefore, it has a structure surrounded by a dark cloud of cosmic dust. However, the star also spews out bright clouds of extremely hot, ionized gas. The colored spots are called Herbig-Haro objects, and they form around newborn stars. In this case, the speed of the innermost jet clouds was measured at 77 to 96 km per second.
On the other hand, other telescopes have also imaged HH 211 before, but they could only give us a relatively blurry image (2008-Spitzer Space Telescope). In contrast, state-of-the-art mirrors and infrared sensors on the James Webb telescope were able to image the protostar in unprecedented detail—at a spatial resolution approximately 5 to 10 times higher than previous images of HH 211.According to NASA, HH 211 is several tens of thousand years old and currently has a mass of about 8 percent of the Sun. However, over time, HH 211 is expected to eventually transform into a star like the Sun. However, observations of the James Webb telescope also indicate that HH 211 may actually differ from the Sun in a significant way. NASA says the “wiggles” in the inner jet clouds show symmetry, an indication that HH 211 has turned into a binary star.
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