Stars are the Swiss Army knife of the universe. Starting from primordial hydrogen, which dates back to the beginning of the universe, we produce all the elements necessary for the formation of planets and living things.
In addition, they provide the light and heat necessary for life to form and thrive. Without stars, the universe would be a dark, cold place, without even the material for life.
Stars are of great importance in the universe and have therefore attracted much scientific interest.
As with the remains of stars such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and stars, mass ejections, explosions, and changes in brightness are relatively easy to observe, so we have made many observations about the lives of stars and the end of their lives. I have information. Supernova remnant.
If you’ve ever driven in fog and found that wearing orange or red glasses often helps you see better, you’ve found your answer.
Most of the problem is due to a process called scattering, which causes light to be emitted in all directions by small dust particles or, in the case of fog, water droplets.
Scattering is highly dependent on the wavelength of the light. Shorter wavelengths such as blue and green are strongly scattered, while red is less so. Infrared light has longer wavelengths and is even less scattered than red light, making it ideal for looking inside the birth clouds of stars, apart from being absorbed by the atmosphere.
We need to observe cosmic infrared radiation from above the atmosphere. That’s where the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) comes into play. The telescope is designed to observe in infrared wavelengths that don’t reach the ground.
This makes it ideal for studying the birth and extreme youth of stars.
One of the latest JWST images shows a sun-like star that hasn’t shined in 50,000 years. This object, poetically named HH212, is located in the constellation Orion.
Named after a mythical hunter, this constellation is the most spectacular cluster of stars in the winter sky. The easiest feature to spot is his three star line representing the hunter’s belt.
HH212 is close to these stars, about 1,300 light-years from us. The JWST image shows two pink jets shooting out in opposite directions.
That pink color is due to hydrogen.
The star is very young, since it takes about a million years for the cloud to produce a star, and a Sun-like star will likely continue to shine for 10 billion years. Nuclear fusion has probably been achieved, but it is still growing by drawing material from the birth cloud.
Random clouds of gas and dust in space are usually moving in one direction and rotating. The rotation accelerates as the cloud shrinks, similar to when a twirling skater or ballerina pulls on their arms.
Some of the material forms rapidly rotating protostars (future stars). The rest forms a disk, some of which spins too fast to collapse into the star. This leads to the formation of planets, asteroids, and other celestial bodies.
There are magnetic fields in clouds, and magnetic fields are also concentrated in disks and young stars.
These combine with very hot gases to form a putty-like material. It resists compression by material falling from the disk and is squeezed out of the star’s polar regions in two jets more or less at right angles to the disk.
This young star has not yet settled into a steady glow, making many small burps and explosions, sending shockwaves outward.
These cause the hydrogen in the jet to glow in a characteristic pink color. If he could go back 4.5 billion years to the birth of the sun, he would probably see something like this:
————
After sunset, Saturn will be in the south and Jupiter will be in the east. Venus rises early in the morning. The moon reaches its first quarter on November 20th.
Ken Tapping is an astronomer at the National Research Council’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton.
