Nasa’s James Webb telescope has blessed us yet again with a stunning picture of the cosmos. This time it’s the birth of a star in the form of a fiery hourglass.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the once-hidden features of protostar L1527 with its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The image gives scientists insight into the beginnings of a new star.

These blazing clouds are only visible in infrared light, making it an ideal target for Webb. The protostar itself is hidden from view within the ‘neck’ of this hourglass shape.

‘An edge-on protoplanetary disk is seen as a dark line across the middle of the neck. Light from the protostar leaks above and below this disk, illuminating cavities within the surrounding gas and dust,’ said Nasa in a statement.

The region’s most prevalent features, the blue and orange clouds, outline cavities created as material shoots away from the protostar and collides with surrounding matter.

The colours themselves are due to layers of dust between Webb and the clouds. The blue areas are where the dust is thinnest and the orange areas are where the layer of dust is thicker and less of the blue light is able to escape.

The star is only about 100,000 years old, making it a relatively young one. Given its age and its brightness in far-infrared light, L1527 is considered a class 0 protostar, the earliest class.

Protostars like these, which are still cocooned in a dark cloud of dust and gas, have a long way to go before they become full-fledged stars. L1527 doesn’t generate its own energy through nuclear fusion of hydrogen yet, an essential characteristic of stars.

It also doesn’t have much of a shape, taking the form of a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas somewhere between 20 and 40% of the mass of our sun.

The scene shown in this image reveals L1527 gathering mass while its core gradually compresses and gets closer to stable nuclear fusion.

The surrounding molecular cloud is made up of dense dust and gas being drawn to the centre, where the protostar resides. As the material falls in, it spirals around the centre.

This creates a dense disk of material, known as an accretion disk, which feeds material to the protostar. As it gains more mass and compresses further, the temperature of its core will rise, eventually reaching the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin.

The disk, seen in the image as a dark band in front of the bright centre, is about the size of our solar system. Given the density, it’s not unusual for much of this material to clump together – the beginnings of planets.

Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our sun and the solar system looked like in their infancy.

The $9 billion James Webb infrared telescope was launched into space on Christmas day last year.

It reached its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles from Earth a month later and is expected to revolutionize astronomy by allowing scientists to peer farther than before and with greater precision into the cosmos, to the dawn of the known universe.

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