HOPS 383 Protostar & Stellar Companions in Orion | James Webb Space Telescope
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HOPS 383 is a Class 0 protostar. It is the first Class 0 protostar discovered to have had an outburst, and as of 2020, the youngest protostar known to have had an outburst. The outburst, discovered by the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey (HOPS) team, was first reported in February 2015 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. A protostar is a very young star that is still gathering mass from its parent molecular cloud. It is the earliest phase in the process of stellar evolution. For a low-mass star (i.e. that of the Sun or lower), it lasts about 500,000 years. The phase begins when a molecular cloud fragment first collapses under the force of self-gravity and an opaque, pressure-supported core forms inside the collapsing fragment. It ends when the infalling gas is depleted, leaving a pre-main-sequence star, which contracts to later become a main-sequence star at the onset of hydrogen fusion producing helium.
HOPS 383 is located within the Orion molecular cloud complex (or, simply, the Orion complex). It is a star-forming region with stellar ages ranging up to 12 million years. The complex is between 1,000 and 1,400 light-years away, and hundreds of light-years across.The Orion complex is one of the most active regions of nearby stellar formation visible in the night sky, and is home to both protoplanetary discs and very young stars. Much of it is bright in infrared wavelengths due to the heat-intensive processes involved in stellar formation.
Judy Schmidt: "Infrared view from the James Webb Space Telescope situated just north of the bright Orion Nebula, but under Messier 43. Instead of viewing the visibly bright part of the Orion molecular cloud complex, this is looking into a rather dusty cloud with lots of jets propelled by forming protostars visible. Darker areas are clouds of dense dust thick enough that even Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) did not detect any emission from them. It is possible to see many background galaxies, so we are probably seeing much of what there is to see. No doubt a Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI) view could see jets that are occluded by the dust, though."
North is about 77° clockwise from up.
Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope launched into space to date. Under an international collaboration agreement, the European Space Agency (ESA) provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI that was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Arizona.
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Processing: Judy Schmidt
Release Date: April 6, 2025
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