Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars. “A big question … Read more
Two actively forming stars are responsible for the shimmering hourglass-shaped ejections of gas and dust that gleam in orange, blue, and purple in this representative color image captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This star system, called Lynds 483, is named for American astronomer Beverly T. Lynds, who published extensive catalogs of “dark” and … Read more
High-resolution near-infrared light captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows extraordinary new detail and structure in Lynds 483 (L483). Two actively forming stars are responsible for the shimmering ejections of gas and dust that gleam in orange, blue, and purple in this representative color image. Over tens of thousands of years, the central protostars … Read more
These protostars get their names from the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey, conducted with ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory. The object visible in the upper-right corner of this image is HOPS 150: it’s a binary star system where two young protostars orbit each other. Each star has a small, dusty disk of material surrounding it. These stars … Read more
Scientists used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine select star-forming areas in the Extreme Outer Galaxy in near- and mid-infrared light. Within this star-forming region, known as Digel Cloud 2S, the telescope observed young, newly formed stars and their extended jets of material. This Webb image also shows a dense sea of background galaxies … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a phenomenon for the very first time. The bright red streaks at top left of this June 20, 2024, image are aligned protostar outflows – jets of gas from newborn stars that all slant in the same direction. This image supports astronomers’ assumption that as clouds collapse to … Read more
As the protostar continues to age and release energetic jets, it’ll consume, destroy, and push away much of this molecular cloud, and many of the structures we see here will begin to fade. Eventually, once it finishes gathering mass, this impressive display will end, and the star itself will become more apparent, even to our … Read more
Nebulae are areas rich in the raw material needed to form new stars. Under the influence of gravity, parts of these molecular clouds collapse until they coalesce into very young, developing stars, called protostars, which are still surrounded by spinning discs of leftover gas and dust. The protostars forming in RCW 7 are particularly massive, … Read more
FS Tau is a multi-star system made up of FS Tau A, the bright star-like object near the middle of the image, and FS Tau B (Haro 6-5B), the bright object to the far right obscured by a dark, vertical lane of dust. The young objects are surrounded by gently illuminated gas and dust of … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) has identified a variety of complex organic molecules that are present in interstellar ices surrounding two protostars. These molecules, which are key ingredients for making potentially habitable worlds, include ethanol, formic acid, methane, and likely acetic acid, in the solid phase. The finding came from the study … Read more