– The James Webb Space Telescope captured a new image of the Serpens Nebula, a star-forming region 1,300 light-years away.
– The image reveals baby stars in the nebula “roaring to life” for the first time. JWST’s infrared capabilities allow it to see through dust and gas clouds.
– Red streaks in the image are jets of gas shooting from newborn stars as they collide with surrounding material, creating shockwaves. All the jets point in the same direction.
– This provides evidence that stars form by collapsing clouds of dust and gas spinning in the same direction, a long-held theory that couldn’t be confirmed before due to limitations of older telescopes.
– The Serpens Nebula is about 1-2 million years old and contains a dense cluster of stars only 100,000 years old visible at the center.
– Orange colors depict dust in front of the reflected light from new stars, while other traces of color come from stellar light bouncing through the nebula.
– JWST’s high-resolution infrared view has revealed baby stars fueling the nebula for the first time, confirming theories about early star formation processes.
Source: Live Science
