What is the most interesting thing about the telescope? What about the images? It was a torturous path from concept to launch.
It provides compelling visual evidence of objects and processes that are hard to see.
There are stars that aren't born immediately. When fusion begins, it takes a long time for a star to get there. Astronomers call a star a Protostar when it is a knot of gas.
A star about 100,000 years old is shown in the latest image. It is the nearest large star forming region to Earth. The first stage of the life of a Protostar is called L1527. The Sun's mass is between 20% and 40% of L1527. The spherical shape of that mass is not stable.
There is a long way to go before it becomes a main sequence star. Light is not coming from fusion. The light comes from shocks on the surface of the star as it gets bigger.
The circumstellar disk can be seen even though the star is hidden. The disk is in the middle of the neck between the two sides of the body. Light from L1527 travels into the upper and lower parts of the hourglass, illuminating the gas.
accretion can be messy and some material is moving away from the star. The blue and orange clouds are carved into the gas by the speed of the material. The colors are created by the dust between L1527 and the Webb.
There is a striking effect to the image. They are driven into these forms by waves and turbulence. Other stars can't form in this region. The protostar can take most of the nearby material for itself.
L1527 is going to become a main sequence star. An accretion disk is a rotating disk that is formed when the material draws material toward the star. The disk rotates and heats the material until it emits light. The material from this disk grows larger and larger. The heat of the gas is raised to extreme heights. The star has high pressure and high temperature. L1527 will be a true star at that time.
Astronomers don't know a lot about planets and stars. The curtain will be drawn on some of those processes. The curtain is a curtain made of gas that can't be seen. The JWST gives us more detailed information on the environment immediately outside of the protostar, so we can better understand it.
There are likely clumps of dust and gas in the dark disk surrounding L1527. This image is a look back in time, to when the planets were still forming and the Sun was only a Protostar.
When the JWST was conceived, it was fascinating. There are a lot of outstanding questions around star formation. The astrophysics community was hungry for a powerful space telescope when the Next Generation Space Telescope was first proposed. Excited minds were looking forward to the next space telescope as the Hubble produced amazing results.
The paper proposes to bring the power of NGST to bear on one of the most important problems in star formation. We want to answer these questions by using a program of mid-IR and NGST observations. We will look at the infalling envelopes, central objects, accretion disks, and accretion-powered jets from the stars.
We are here after a lot of hard work.
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