Panning across Nebula NGC 1333: Stellar Nursery in Perseus | Webb Telescope
Webb’s superb sensitivity allows astronomers to investigate young objects with extremely low masses. The faintest ‘stars’ in the picture are in fact newly born free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to those of giant planets.
The center of the image presents a deep peek into the heart of the NGC 1333 cloud. Across the image, we see large patches of orange that represent gas glowing in the infrared. These so-called Herbig-Haro objects form when ionized material ejected from young stars collides with the surrounding cloud. They are hallmarks of a very active site of star formation.
Many of the young stars in this image are surrounded by discs of gas and dust. These may eventually produce planetary systems. On the right hand side of the image, we can glimpse the shadow of one of these discs oriented edge-on—two dark cones emanating from opposite sides, seen against a bright background.
Similarly to the young stars in this mosaic, our own Sun and planets formed inside a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun did not form in isolation but as part of a cluster. It was perhaps even more massive than NGC 1333. The cluster in the mosaic, only 1–3 million years old, presents us with an opportunity to study stars like our Sun, as well as brown dwarfs and free-floating planets, in their nascent stages.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana
Duration: 30 seconds
Release Date: Aug. 27, 2024
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