Yesterday, NASA released a series of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showing an extraordinary nebula and the formation of new stars.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a series of highly detailed photographs from the iconic "Pillars of Creation", a region where new stars form in dense clouds of gas and dust.
The three-dimensional "Pillars of Creation" (as NASA has dubbed them) look like majestic rock formations, but they are much more permeable. These plumes consist of interstellar gas and dust that are occasionally seen, translucent in near-infrared light.
The Webb telescope's new view of the Pillars of Creation (first made famous when it was imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995) will help researchers refresh their star formation models by identifying much more precise numbers of newly formed stars. along with the amounts of gas and dust in the area.
Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form. The newly formed stars in these Webb camera images are the bright red spheres that typically have diffraction spikes and are located outside one of the dusty pillars.
When regions of sufficient mass form within the columns of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heating up and eventually forming new stars. These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.
But what about those wavy lava-like lines on the ends of some of the pillars? These are ejections from stars that are still forming in the gas and dust.
Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material like these thick pillars. This sometimes also leads to vibrations, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water.
The crimson glow seen in some photos comes from energetic hydrogen molecules resulting from jets and vibrations.
