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Ever wondered what the Sun looked like in its infancy? 

A new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured what Earth's sun looked like when it was only a few tens of thousands of years old. 

The image of Herbig-Haro 211 (HH 211), released by NASA on Sept. 14, shows the outflow of a young star. "An infantile analogue of our Sun," NASA said in a 

Located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, HH21 has only about 8% of the Sun's mass. A Class 0 protostar, meaning the nascent star is less than 100,000 years old, "eventually will grow into a star like the Sun," 

The stunning, high-resolution image, with shades of blue and pink erupting from a dark center, shows the luminous region surrounding the newborn star, known as a Herbig-Haro object. As the new star ejects gas jets, these winds collide with neighboring gas and dust, producing the colorful outflow we see in the image. 

On X (previously Twitter), the image of HH211 inspired different interpretations from viewers. 

"like stretching when i wake up from a nap," 

 on a NASA post about the infrared image. 

"That kind of looks like the jet from a sci-fi particle cannon," 

, newborn stars are "invariably still embedded within the gas from the molecular cloud in which they formed," making them hard to document. However, Webb's sensitive infrared instruments make it a powerful tool to record these celestial bodies. 

Clare Marie Schneider

Author

A new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals what Earth's sun could have looked like in its infancy. 

NASA releases 'baby picture' of a star that will grow up to be much like our sun

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