PREVIEW

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BY MARK WORGAN

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a spectacular new image of dueling jets lighting up a stellar nursery where young stars are emerging from clouds of gas and dust.

The nebula, known as NGC 7129, lies about 3,300 light-years from Earth and contains stars and protostars at different stages of development.

Webb's infrared instruments allow astronomers to see through dense clouds that scatter or absorb other forms of light, revealing stars that have previously been hidden.

The region offers scientists an opportunity to study how stars are born and how they influence the environment around them.

Stars form inside cold, dense molecular clouds made up largely of gas and dust. These dusty cocoons can make young stars difficult to observe with telescopes that cannot detect infrared light.

Webb's high sensitivity to infrared radiation allows astronomers to peer through the dust and examine the earliest stages of stellar evolution.

The stars in NGC 7129 are at different points in their development. More massive stars form and evolve more rapidly, and the most massive and mature object in the region is the luminous central star LkH(alpha) 234, pronounced "Lick-H-alpha".

The star, which produces the image's most prominent diffraction pattern, is a pre-main-sequence star estimated to have between five and eight times the mass of the Sun.

Pre-main-sequence stars have largely finished gathering material and are contracting under their own gravity, causing their temperatures to rise. Eventually, LkH(alpha) 234 will begin fusing hydrogen, as the Sun does.

To the left of the star is a golden cavity stretching about 3.5 light-years across. It is the clearest indication of the central star's influence on its surroundings.

Outflows produced during an earlier stage of the star's development have carved into the surrounding molecular cloud of hydrogen. The outflows, together with the star's radiation, energise the gas and make it glow.

While some of the hydrogen is blown away, other material is compressed, creating conditions that could trigger the formation of further stars.
Several young stars can be seen inside the cavity. Some are also pre-main-sequence stars and produce stellar winds.

Curved structures known as bow shocks appear around some of them, where those winds push into the surrounding energetic gas and carve out smaller cavities.

Together, the central and embedded stars have also created the sharp ridge visible at the top of the golden cavity.

Their radiation heats the surrounding environment and pushes against the colder, denser molecular gas beyond the cavity, producing a boundary known as a photodissociation region.

Within this region, hydrogen molecules are broken apart into individual atoms.

By changing the temperature and chemistry of the surrounding material, the stars provide a glimpse of how molecular clouds may gradually erode over millions of years.

To the right of the central star, the scene is markedly different. Clumpy red material obscures objects that are younger than those seen on the left: protostars.

The protostar phase occurs before the pre-main-sequence stage, after clouds of gas and dust have begun to collapse and fragment.

As protostars accumulate material and grow, they eject streams of superheated matter. These outflows collide with the dense, grey material surrounding them, producing shocks and giving the region its textured appearance.

The red glow is also produced by these interactions. Several outflows from different stars overlap along our line of sight, contributing to the chaotic appearance of the region.

More protostellar outflows can be seen towards the upper left of the image, close to a blue nebula.

At the centre of the blue region is a protostar surrounded by a disc of material shaped like a doughnut. The disc casts a shadow across the surrounding nebula.

The structure is reminiscent of the "Bat Shadow", a similar phenomenon observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Webb's high spatial resolution has revealed a wealth of detail in the gas and dust of NGC 7129.
Astronomers are expected to continue studying the Webb observations to understand how the young stars and protostars are shaping the material around them – and how stellar nurseries evolve over millions of years.