The colorful clouds are only visible in infrared light, so they had never been seen before when captured by Webb’s near-infrared camera (Nircam), Nasa and the European Space Agency said in a statement on Wednesday. The very young star, known as protostar L1527, is hidden in the darkness by the edge of a rotating disc of gas at the neck of the hourglass. However, light pours in from the top and bottom of the disc, illuminating the hourglass-shaped clouds. The clouds are created by material ejected from the star colliding with the surrounding matter, the statement said. The dust is thinner in the blue parts and thicker in the orange parts, he added. The protostar, which is only 100,000 years old and in the early stages of star formation, is not yet able to produce its own energy. The surrounding black disk, which is about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches “the threshold for the initiation of nuclear fusion,” the statement said. “Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our sun and solar system looked like in their early days,” it added. The protostar is located in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a stellar nursery of hundreds of nearly formed stars about 430 light-years from Earth. Operating since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built and has already released a wealth of unprecedented data as well as stunning images. Scientists hope it will herald a new era of discovery. One of the main goals for the $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another major research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside of Earth’s solar system.
