IRISH SCIENTISTS HAVE captured one of the most advanced images of a stellar birth ever taken using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). 

The research observations, led by Professor Tom Ray at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, were published today in the Nature journal. 

Using the JWST, the image captures one of the youngest stars known to scientists, the Herbig-Haro 211-mm, which is thought to be just a few thousand years old. 

The image shows jets being emitted by the young star. 

“Stars are not constant, they have a beginning and an end just like the rest of us. The process, however, takes thousands of millions of years,” Professor Tom Ray said. 

“By developing our understanding about how they are born, through breakthroughs such as this, we are deepening our knowledge on how our sun and the solar system came into being,” Ray said. 

Ray said that “one very exciting discovery from this new image is that when a star comes into being it emits highly supersonic beams of matter that can stretch for several light-years”. 

“These beams resemble Star Wars light sabers and shine with light from many different atoms and molecules,” he said. 

Ray explained that new stars are often enshrouded in gas and dust, making it difficult for them to be spotted from Earth. 

The JWST uses infrared light to break through the gas and dust, revealing stellar births and stars such as the Herbig-Haro 211-mm.

“The research reveals that the very youngest stars appear to emit beams of almost pure molecules contrary to what astronomers thought before and move very slowly,” Ray said. 

“How such beams are produced without the added ingredients of atoms and ions is currently a mystery.” 

Launched in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest telescope. It is a collaborative mission between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

One of its main aims is to understand how stars and planets are formed.

Over the course of its 10-year mission, it is aimed that the JWST will collect more infrared light than any previous telescope, looking deeper into space to see the earliest stars, planets and galaxies in the universe, and study how they were formed.

As a result of their earlier involvement in the development of the telescope, astronomers at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies have guaranteed access to the Webb telescope to study star formation.