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What it is : The Serpens Nebula
Where it is:1,300 loose - years off , in the configuration Serpens
The Serpens Nebula as seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
When it was share : Aug. 12 , 2024
Why it ’s so special : This is a new figure of speech of an old favourite , the Serpens Nebula , where a cloud of gas and junk is lit up by starlight . Using its infrared capability , theJames Webb Space Telescope(JWST ) now reveals the rootage of that light : newborn wizard .
The place to look in this image , taken with JWST ’s Near Infrared Camera , is the top - pass on corner . The bright - red streaks are fountain of gas from newborn stars smacking into the surrounding gas pedal and dust , make shock waves . Crucially , they all slant in the same direction .
That ’s important because it provides grounds for the possibility that when cloud of dust and gas collapse to organise star , all of those stars spin in the same direction . The difficulty is , before JWST was around to watch over in the infrared — to pierce wooden-headed clouds of dust and gas — it was n’t possible to see newborn star topology or their jets in opthalmic wavelengths , so it was impossible to confirm that theory .
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" Astronomers have long take that as cloud crumble to imprint stars , the stars will lean to twirl in the same counsel , ' saidKlaus Pontoppidan , chief investigator atNASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena , California . " However , this has not been realise so immediately before . These aligned , elongated body structure are a historical platter of the fundamental way that principal are carry . "
Serpens is a reflection nebula , a swarm of flatulency and dust that does not make its own spark but muse luminousness from stars penny-pinching to or within it . All traces of color you see in this image — as filaments and wisp — are reflected starlight from new-sprung stars . Orange denotes where dust is in front of the ruminate luminance .
The Serpens Nebula is about 1 million to 2 million years old — incredibly young in cosmic terms . This whizz - forming region is house to a dense cluster of new-sprung stars that are a bare 100,000 eld old , which are visible at the center of the image .
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