James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

NASA's Webb Captures Celestial Fireworks Around Forming Star

Star-spangled ?? Webb’s new red, white and blue image features a star-to-be: a protostar. Only about 100,000 years old, this relatively young object is hidden in the “neck” of the hourglass-shaped cloud of gas and dust. The scene here was captured with Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument. Blue represents carbon-rich molecules, and red highlights the protostar and the planet-forming disk around it. The white areas represent a mixture of hydrocarbons, ionized neon, and thick dust. As the protostar grows older, it will continue to consume, destroy, and push away much of the cloud. Eventually, once it finishes gathering mass, the star will become much easier to see. Learn more about the region: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-captures-celest... Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Image description: A growing protostar embedded within a molecular cloud. The center of the image shows a bright, red region, where the protostar resides, with a thin, gray lane cutting through it horizontally, which is the protostar’s accretion disk. Above and below this region are white and blue triangular-shaped cavities in the molecular cloud, which give the overall object an hourglass shape. The areas of the cavities closest to the central protostar have more pronounced plumes of white gas and dust that fade to a blue color further from the center. There are red, yellow, orange, blue, and green stars and galaxies scattered across the image. Image & Description by NASA