With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been providing better and better images for a year now, NASA has shown what the Sun could be like.

A year ago, the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s most expensive astronomical instrument to date, began science operations. The structure cost a total of $10 billion, or about 339 billion forints at today’s exchange rate.

On the occasion of the anniversary, NASA released a telescope image, in which the instrument captured the star-forming region closest to Earth, Rho Ophiuchi in the constellation of the Serpent. The image clearly shows the functioning of the structure: its tentacles see through cosmic clouds and dust, which would otherwise hide the place where stars form from us.

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Rho Ophiuchi is a star formation site where sun-like stars are born. It is located about 390 light-years from Earth, so Webb can take a very detailed picture of it. According to NASA, this is also due to the fact that there are no stars between the area and Webb that would affect the way the images are captured.

The image shows nearly 50 new stars with a mass similar to that of the Sun. The darker parts of the image are the most intense, and this is where the so-called protostars can be found.

The red lines in the image are huge jets of molecular hydrogen. They appear when a new star ejects material from its birthplace. In the center of the lower half of the image you can see the star S1, which is the only star in the region with a mass greater than that of the Sun.

According to Klaus Pontopidan, one of the Webb project scientists, the new image allows us to track a short period of stellar evolution. This is also important because the Sun also went through a similar phase.

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