It’s a chicken! It’s a aircraft! It’s a ???
Over the previous week, a high-resolution picture of two younger orbiting stars captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has grabbed the eye of astronomical fans and punctuation aficionados alike for what seems to appear like a galactic query mark.
The photograph, initially taken in May and launched in late June, offers viewers a detailed take a look at a few of the improbable cosmic phenomena taking place light-years away from Earth. Spanning roughly three light-years throughout in the Vela Constellation, the composite near-infrared gentle picture reveals a pair of actively growing stars referred to as Herbig-Haro 46/47. The pair of stars, that are buried on the epicenter of the picture behind the purple gentle diffraction, are “just a few thousand years old,” reads a statement on the James Webb Space Telescope’s web site.
“When the stars ‘eat’ too much material in too short a time, they respond by sending out two-sided jets along the opposite axis, settling down the star’s spin, and removing mass from the area,” the assertion reads. “Over millennia, these ejections regulate how much mass the stars retain.”
While this picture of Herbig-Haro 46/47 is fascinating in itself, because it offers researchers an concept of what our personal solar could have regarded like originally, straight under the mass is what seems to be a mysteriously well-punctuated message from the universe. While it’s unclear precisely what this query mark is, its shade and form give researchers a clue. Representatives of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) informed Space.com that the purple fuzzy picture is “probably a distant galaxy, or potentially interacting galaxies (their interactions may have caused the distorted question mark-shape).”
“This may be the first time we’ve seen this particular object,” STScI added in their assertion to the media outlet, including that “additional follow-up would be required to figure out what it is with any certainty.”
“Webb is showing us many new, distant galaxies — so there’s a lot of new science to be done!”
