Product details

Description
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's first anniversary image shows the star birth like never before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest region to Earth where stars form. It's a comparatively small, tranquil stellar nativity scene, but that's not evident in Webb's chaotic close-up. Rays emanating from young stars traverse the image and affect the surrounding interstellar gas, causing molecular hydrogen to glow and be shown in red. Some stars show the typical shadow of a circumstellar disk from which future planetary systems are formed.

The young stars at the center of many of these disks are similar in mass to the Sun or smaller. The most massive star in this image is star S1, which resides in a glowing cavity that it is carving out with its stellar winds in the lower part of the image. The lighter colored gas around S1 consists of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a family of carbon-based molecules that are among the most common compounds in space.

credits:
Picture:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

Image editing:
Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Keywords:
Emission nebulae, nebulae, star-forming regions, stars
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