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A Starry View

Monika Luabeya

Sep 10, 2024

Image Article

A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the center, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colors show clouds that glow in infrared light.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has infrared vision that lets us peer through the dusty veil of nearby star-forming region NGC 1333. We can see planetary mass objects, newborn stars, and brown dwarfs; some of the faintest ‘stars’ in this mosaic image are in fact newly born free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to those of giant planets. The images were captured as part of a Webb observation program to survey a large portion of NGC 1333. These data constitute the first deep spectroscopic survey of the young cluster.

See Hubble’s view of the same nebula.

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana