The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope gave scientists a big ‘jaw-dropping’ surprise.
According to ABC News, the telescope recently discovered that the long studied star is actually a pair twin.
The space agency announced that the WL 20S star, which has been studied by at least five different telescopes since the 1970s, is a matching star duo.
It also informed that the matching star duo was formed between two and four million years ago.
As per NASA, researchers observed the images from the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which offers ‘spatial and spectral resolution.’
Astronomer Mary Barsony, lead author of the paper, while announcing the results on June 13, “Our jaws dropped. After studying this source for decades, we thought we knew it pretty well. But without MIRI, we would not have known this was two stars or that these jets existed. That's really astonishing. It's like having brand new eyes.”
Moreover, Mike Ressler, project scientist for MIRI at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of the new study, stated in the release, “The power of these two telescopes together is really incredible. If we hadn't seen that these were two stars, the ALMA results might have just looked like a single disk with a gap in the middle. Instead, we have new data about two stars that are clearly at a critical point in their lives, when the processes that formed them are petering out.”
The discovery of the twin star was presented at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on June 12.
