James Webb Space Telescope Discovery
Clicking on each image will open the full resolution one. Try it!Clicking on "Raw images" image will yield all the relevant raw images.
Webb Celebrates First Year of Science With Close-up on Birth of Sun-like Stars
The first anniversary image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disc, the makings of future planetary systems.
The young stars at the centre of many of these discs are similar in mass to the Sun or smaller. The heftiest in this image is the star S1, which appears amid a glowing cave it is carving out with its stellar winds in the lower half of the image. The lighter-coloured gas surrounding S1 consists of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a family of carbon-based molecules that are among the most common compounds found in space.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Pontoppidan (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI)
Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex
Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex (annotated)
Raw images
