Scientists spot cosmic Star Wars-like lightsaber

NASA has revealed a jaw-dropping image of an unusual stellar jet captured by the James Webb Space Telescope - which resembles film baddie Darth Maul's weapon.

The NASA Webb Mission Team said Wednesday, Sept. 10: "Streaking across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, the outflow resembles a double-bladed dueling lightsaber from the Star Wars films."

They added that the spectacle was a "blowtorch of seething gases erupting from a volcanically growing monster star."

Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system.

The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualify it as rare, say researchers.

The central protostar, weighing as much as ten of our Suns, is located 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of our galaxy.

Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, lead author of a research paper, said: "We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy.

"Massive stars, like the one found inside this cluster, have very important influences on the evolution of galaxies. Our discovery is shedding light on the formation mechanism of massive stars in low metallicity environments, so we can use this massive star as a laboratory to study what was going on in earlier cosmic history."