JWST Snaps 'Cosmic Tornado' From Star’s Birth

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, this stunning cosmic event has been photographed in unprecedented detail.

Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScl

When a star is born, the process leaves behind a flurry of high-energy gas, dust and debris, reports Scientific American. Some of this remnant material clumps together into planets, the way Earth probably formed. Others end up floating endlessly as meteors and space dust. But when conditions are just right, powerful plasma jets blasting out of a young star whip some of the debris into a giant, helical tower of steamy-looking cosmic dust - one of which we now can see better than ever before.

Astronomers had long been aware of these so-called Herbig-Haro objects - brilliant flares of ionized gas, often near newborn stars, that can be light-years long - including the one named HH 49/50 (pictured) whose spiralling shape led to being referred to as the “cosmic tornado.”

The $10 billion JWST was launched in December 2021 and is the largest telescope in space -equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, allowing it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, this remarkable instrument has captured this field of dust and debris just as a baby protostar (probably located somewhere on its lower right, outside the boundary of the image shown here) was blasting it into this very particular shape. The fuzzy blob at the top resolves into a distant spiral galaxy unrelated to the object itself. Its apparent position atop this ongoing event is just a quirk of our perspective.

“You’re looking at a snapshot of a moment in the universe,” says Macarena Garcia Marin, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency who was part of the team that took the new image.

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