James Webb telescope finds a warped ‘Butterfly Star’ shedding its chrysalis — Space photograph of the week

This spectacular new picture from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals a star cocooned inside an enormous disk of gasoline and dirt. It’s a protoplanetary disk — a hoop of dense gasoline and dirt surrounding a younger star — the place planets are seemingly forming.

The star is IRAS 04302+2247, higher referred to as the “Butterfly Star” due to how our edge-on view separates the intense nebula into two lobes.

The star system is about 525 light-years away, within the Taurus star-forming area, or Taurus Molecular Cloud, which is within the constellation Taurus in the night sky. It’s the closest star-forming region to the solar system, and it’s rich in molecular hydrogen, dust and heavier elements from past supernovas. These are raw materials for new stars and planets.

Much of this region is invisible to optical telescopes but is revealed in infrared light. This image is a combination of mostly optical data from the archive of the Hubble Space Telescope and new infrared data from JWST’s Near Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) , the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we’re getting nearer than ever.

MIRI revealed a darkish, dusty lane — the protoplanetary disk — that divides the nebula. It blocks the star’s mild, whereas surrounding gasoline and dirt scatter the star’s mild. It’s enormous — about 40 billion miles (65 billion kilometers) throughout, or a number of occasions wider than the photo voltaic system, in line with ESA.

The line of sight determines what astronomers can study from pictures like this. In face-on pictures of protoplanetary disks, scientists can typically see rings, spirals or gaps the place planets are forming. With an edge-on view like this, it is attainable to check the thickness of a protoplanetary disk and the way mud is distributed round it, each of that are key to understanding how planets kind and accumulate mass. Here, mud is predicted to settle towards the midplane, creating situations the place grains can clump and develop into planetesimals.

The picture comes from a paper published final yr in The Astrophysical Journal. The research discovered that the brightness of the nebula adjustments, which suggests the internal disk could also be warped or misaligned. It’s a glimpse into processes which will have formed our personal photo voltaic system billions of years in the past.

For extra chic area pictures, take a look at our Space Photo of the Week archives.