NASA says infrared light let Webb peer through the nebula’s dust, helping scientists study how stars change over time.
NASA says its Webb telescope used infrared light to peer through dust in a nebula, revealing many stars of different ages. The agency says the view helps it study how stars change over time.
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NASA's new Webb image turns one dusty stellar nursery into a snapshot of several stages of star formation. NGC 7129 lies about 3,300 light-years from Earth, and its clouds of gas and dust hide many young objects from telescopes that cannot see infrared light. Webb's infrared sensitivity cuts through much of that material, bringing stars and protostars into view together.
The most prominent object near the center is LkHα 234, which NASA describes as the most massive and mature star in the scene. It is a pre-main-sequence star, meaning it has mostly finished gathering material but has not yet begun the stable hydrogen fusion that powers stars such as the sun. NASA estimates its mass at roughly five to eight times that of the sun.
To the star's left, a gold-colored cavity stretches about 3.5 light-years. Outflows from an earlier stage of LkHα 234's development helped carve into the surrounding molecular cloud, while the star's radiation energizes the gas. Some hydrogen has been pushed away, but some has also been compressed, creating conditions that can support more star formation.
The red, clumpy region to the right contains much younger protostars. These objects are still accumulating material, and they eject hot outflows that crash into the dense gas around them. Those shocks produce the textured red glow seen in the processed infrared image. In the upper-left portion of the scene, another protostar sits inside a disk whose shadow falls across a blue nebula.
The image's colors map different physical conditions rather than showing what human eyes would see. Hot atomic hydrogen appears gold. Cooler molecular hydrogen shocked by protostellar outflows is represented in red, while the coldest, densest gas, where stars have not yet formed, appears gray.
That contrast lets astronomers examine how young stars reshape the clouds that made them. Radiation, winds and outflows can disperse gas, compress nearby material and alter the chemistry at the boundary between warmer atomic hydrogen and colder molecular gas.
Webb also resolves finer filaments of gas and dust than NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope did in its view of the same region, while exposing many more background galaxies. NASA says researchers will use the Webb data to study how stars at different stages influence their surroundings and how the molecular cloud may erode over millions of years.
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