Astronomers have captured the first clear image of a giant “bubble” surrounding a young star that closely resembles what our own sun looked like billions of years ago.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists observed this energetic young star blowing a vast bubble of hot gas into space, offering a rare glimpse into the early life of sun-like stars.
The bubble, known as an astrosphere, forms when powerful winds of charged particles stream outward from a star and push against the surrounding gas and dust in the galaxy.
Our sun has a similar protective bubble called the heliosphere, created by the solar wind.
It stretches far beyond the outer planets and helps shield Earth from harmful particles traveling through interstellar space.
The newly observed star, named HD 61005, sits about 120 light-years from Earth. It has roughly the same size and temperature as the sun but is far younger—only about 100 million years old compared with the sun’s 5-billion-year age.
Because of its youth, the star is much more active. Its stellar wind moves about three times faster than the sun’s and is roughly 25 times denser, making its bubble far more dramatic.
Researchers say this observation is like looking back in time at what our sun may have been doing when the solar system was still forming. Studying this young star helps scientists understand how the sun’s behavior has changed over billions of years and how its protective bubble evolved as it moved through the Milky Way.
Astronomers have nicknamed the HD 61005 system “the Moth” because clouds of dust around the star resemble the shape of moth wings when viewed in infrared light.
This dust is leftover material from the star’s formation, similar to the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune in our own solar system. The region around the star is also unusually dense with interstellar gas and dust—about a thousand times denser than the environment around the sun today—which helped make the bubble easier to detect.
The astrosphere around HD 61005 was spotted in X-rays because the star’s powerful wind crashes into the surrounding cold material, heating it enough to glow in high-energy radiation.
The bubble is enormous, spanning a distance about 200 times the space between Earth and the sun. Astronomers had searched for decades for a clear image of such a structure around a sun-like star, and this is the first time they have succeeded.
The discovery also reveals how different the sun’s protective shield could be depending on its location in the galaxy. If our solar system were in a denser region like the Moth’s neighborhood, the heliosphere might shrink dramatically, possibly reaching only as far as Saturn’s orbit. Conversely, if HD 61005 were in our calmer region of space, its bubble could be even larger.
Although HD 61005 is too faint to see with the naked eye, it can be spotted with binoculars. Astronomers first detected hints of X-rays from the star in 2014, but a much longer observation in 2021 finally revealed the full structure of its bubble.
The finding gives scientists a new way to study how stars like our sun shape their surroundings—and how those changes may influence the habitability of planets over time.
