Frothy and resembling an ice cream sundae — that’s how NASA described a newly-released, stunning image of a cosmic tornado from its James Webb Space Telescope.
The telescope captured an image of the bright cloud of gas and dust that surrounds a newborn star, otherwise known as a Herbig-Haro object.
The outflows from this forming star can extend for light years, NASA said. It creates shockwaves and emits light as it cools.
“When NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope observed it in 2006, scientists nicknamed Herbig-Haro 49/50 (HH 49/50) the “Cosmic Tornado” for its helical appearance, but they were uncertain about the nature of the fuzzy object at the tip of the “tornado,” the space agency explained. “With its higher imaging resolution, Webb provides a different visual impression of HH 49/50 by revealing fine features of the shocked regions in the outflow, uncovering the fuzzy object to be a distant spiral galaxy, and displaying a sea of distant background galaxies.”
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NASA said this particular Herbig-Haro is located in the Chamaeleon I Cloud complex, which is one of the nearest active star formation regions in our Milky Way.
The cloud complex is similar to the environment that our Sun formed in, according to NASA.
