James Webb Space Telescope spies never-before-seen star behavior in distant nebula (video, photo)

Stefanie Waldek
·2 min read
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A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.
The Serpens Nebula, as imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. | Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Pontoppidan (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and J. Green (Space Telescope Science Institute)

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken another extraordinary photo.

The subject is the Serpens Nebula, which lies about 1,300 light-years from Earth. And the new JWST image showcases a very special phenomenon long theorized to exist, but never before observed.

In the upper left part of the photo are several "protostellar outflows," or jets of gas erupting out of newborn stars. While we've seen such outflows before, we've never seen them line up in the same direction as in the JWST image; NASA likens them to "sleet pouring down during a storm."

A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.

The alignment of the protostellar outflows provides key insight into how stars form and provides strong support for a long-held theory.

"Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction," principal investigator Klaus Pontoppidan, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. "However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born."

Related: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — A complete guide

So why haven't we seen them before? It all comes down to the perfect alignment. "This area of the Serpens Nebula — Serpens North — only comes into clear view with Webb," Joel Green, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in the same statement. Green is first author of a new study about the outflows, which you can find here.

"We're now able to catch these extremely young stars and their outflows, some of which previously appeared as just blobs or were completely invisible in optical wavelengths because of the thick dust surrounding them," Green added.

Chalk up another win to Webb's incredible imaging power!

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This image of the Serpens Nebula is just the first in a series dedicated to the stellar nursery, so here's to hoping for more discoveries in the near future. Next, JWST will image the nebula with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument to analyze its chemical makeup.

"Looking at the abundance of these critical compounds in protostars just before their protoplanetary disks have formed could help us understand how unique the circumstances were when our own solar system formed," Pontoppidan said.