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| HD 61005 in X-ray and infrared light |
What did our Sun look like in its turbulent youth, billions of years ago? For the first time, astronomers have captured a clear image of a distant, younger version of our star doing exactly what the early Sun likely did: furiously blowing a massive bubble into the galaxy.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has snapped a groundbreaking image of a star named HD 61005, located about 120 light-years from Earth. Dubbed "The Moth" because of the dusty, wing-shaped rings surrounding it, this star is a spitting image of our Sun in its infancy.
While our Sun is a middle-aged 5 billion years old, HD 61005 is a mere 100 million years old. It possesses the same mass and temperature as our Sun, offering astronomers a unique time-travel-like glimpse into our own star's energetic past. The image clearly reveals an astrosphere—a giant bubble of hot gas blown by the star’s powerful wind—extending an astonishing 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
What is an Astrosphere?
Think of it as a star's personal force field. An astrosphere is created when a stream of charged particles, known as stellar wind, pushes outward from the star, slamming into the cooler gas and dust that drifts in interstellar space. Our Sun has a similar protective bubble called the heliosphere, which extends far beyond Pluto and shields our entire solar system, including Earth, from harmful cosmic radiation.
However, we can never capture an image of the Sun's heliosphere from the outside, as we live within it. This is what makes the new image of HD 61005 so revolutionary.
"We have been studying our Sun’s astrosphere for decades, but we can’t see it from the outside," said Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University, who led the study published in the Astrophysical Journal. "This new Chandra result about a similar star’s astrosphere teaches us about the shape of the Sun’s, and how it has changed over billions of years."
Why This Young Star Blows Such a Big Bubble
The secret lies in the star's extreme youth. The stellar wind from HD 61005 is a cosmic powerhouse—it travels three times faster and is an incredible 25 times denser than the wind from our current, calmer Sun.
When this ferocious wind rams into the surrounding interstellar medium, it heats the gas to millions of degrees, causing it to glow brightly in X-ray light. Chandra's high-resolution X-ray vision was able to detect this glow, making the otherwise invisible structure spring into view. The star's proximity to Earth and its dense local environment further amplified the signal, allowing for this historic detection.
Read the official NASA announcement and see more images from this discovery here.
The "Moth" and the Flame
The star system earned its nickname from the striking, wing-like patterns of dust observed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This debris is similar to the material in our own Kuiper Belt—the region of icy bodies beyond Neptune. The interstellar matter surrounding HD 61005 is about a thousand times denser than the space around our Sun, helping to sculpt these unique features.
"We are impacted by the Sun every day, not only through the light it gives off, but also by the wind it sends out into space that can affect our satellites and potentially astronauts," said co-author Scott Wolk of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This image of the astrosphere around HD 61005 gives us important information about what the Sun’s wind may have been like early in its evolution."
The discovery also highlights how our Sun's protective capabilities have changed. If our solar system were located in a dense region like the one surrounding HD 61005, our heliosphere would shrink dramatically, only reaching as far as the orbit of Saturn.
The research combined a brief Chandra observation from 2014 with a much deeper, 19-hour exposure in 2021. While the star itself is not visible to the naked eye, it can be spotted with binoculars. But its true beauty, and scientific value, are now revealed in spectacular detail by the most powerful X-ray eyes in the sky.
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/John Hopkins Univ./C.M. Lisse et al.; Infrared: NASA/ESA/STIS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
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| HD 61005 in X-ray and infrared light |