How the James Webb Space Telescope Watches Stars Form
Infrared technology changes what we can see in space.
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Transcript
[Music in]
NARRATOR: The places where stars and planets are born are among the galaxies most beautiful locales. These cosmic landscapes change as new generations of stars light up and disperse their birth cloud. But the youngest stars seen here are already perhaps a million years old. Hardly toddlers.
Stars and planets form in the dark, inside vast, cold clouds of gas and dust, such as these pillars imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The dust is so thick we can't see the infant stars inside, at least not with visible light.
With infrared light, Hubble can see through all but the thickest dust. Yet it's in those dense knots that the youngest stars are forming.
To peer inside them, astronomers need the James Webb Space Telescope.
With a mirror larger than Hubble's and performance optimized for the infrared, Webb will give astronomers their closest look yet at stellar birth.
We're flying through a computer model that represents astronomers' best ideas about the star formation process.
Reddish colors indicate thicker dust, the temperature less than 400 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.
Or less than 240 degrees below 0 Celsius.
That pinwheel ahead is a protostar. Perhaps 10,000 years old. Protostars arise when a dense knot of dust less than a light-year across collapses. But the details of the process are not well known.
Elsewhere in the cloud, another protostar is preparing to build planets. As the cloud that created the protostar collapsed, it flattened into a disc. The disc we see here is 600 times the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun.
If placed in our solar system, it would extend far beyond the planets.
In this computer model the disc continues to accumulate gas and dust from its surroundings for thousands of years. Eventually the disc fragments, producing dense bright structures. These may become sites where giant planets form.
Later, during another phase of construction, smaller Earth-size planets may take shape.
At least that's what scientists think happens. It will take the Webb Telescope's keen infrared eye to see what's really going on in the cold heart of stellar nurseries.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: The places where stars and planets are born are among the galaxies most beautiful locales. These cosmic landscapes change as new generations of stars light up and disperse their birth cloud. But the youngest stars seen here are already perhaps a million years old. Hardly toddlers.
Stars and planets form in the dark, inside vast, cold clouds of gas and dust, such as these pillars imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The dust is so thick we can't see the infant stars inside, at least not with visible light.
With infrared light, Hubble can see through all but the thickest dust. Yet it's in those dense knots that the youngest stars are forming.
To peer inside them, astronomers need the James Webb Space Telescope.
With a mirror larger than Hubble's and performance optimized for the infrared, Webb will give astronomers their closest look yet at stellar birth.
We're flying through a computer model that represents astronomers' best ideas about the star formation process.
Reddish colors indicate thicker dust, the temperature less than 400 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.
Or less than 240 degrees below 0 Celsius.
That pinwheel ahead is a protostar. Perhaps 10,000 years old. Protostars arise when a dense knot of dust less than a light-year across collapses. But the details of the process are not well known.
Elsewhere in the cloud, another protostar is preparing to build planets. As the cloud that created the protostar collapsed, it flattened into a disc. The disc we see here is 600 times the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun.
If placed in our solar system, it would extend far beyond the planets.
In this computer model the disc continues to accumulate gas and dust from its surroundings for thousands of years. Eventually the disc fragments, producing dense bright structures. These may become sites where giant planets form.
Later, during another phase of construction, smaller Earth-size planets may take shape.
At least that's what scientists think happens. It will take the Webb Telescope's keen infrared eye to see what's really going on in the cold heart of stellar nurseries.
[Music out]
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