Despite what you might assume, newborn stars aren't dainty, fragile creatures of the cosmos. They terrorize the neighborhood, reshaping space around them and deciding where the next stars can — or can't — be born.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists took an infrared image of a young star cluster called Pismis 24, a spot within the Lobster Nebula about 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. NASA has described the dazzling scene of gas and dust as resembling glowing mountains, "kissed by wispy clouds."
But this stellar nursery, according to recent observations, is anything but cute. Astronomers were surprised by how much influence these young, massive stars had on their surroundings. Webb revealed that their super-hot radiation and stellar winds are so intense, they're bulldozing enormous walls of gas and dust that could have otherwise been used to form other stars.
"This dramatic scene captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope looks like a fantastical tableau from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings," said the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which runs the observatory on behalf of NASA. "But truth is even stranger than fiction."
Webb, a joint partnership of NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts, blasted off on Christmas in 2021 and now circles the sun about 1 million miles from Earth. From the start, NASA said Webb would revolutionize our understanding of the universe. And it delivered: when scientists saw the very first images, one even admitted to having an "ugly cry" because they were so sharp and detailed.
In just a short time, Webb has kicked off what astronomers are calling a golden age of discovery. It’s looking back to less than 300 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies lit up, and it’s also peering into the atmospheres of far-flung planets. Pam Melroy, a former astronaut who served as deputy administrator for NASA during the Biden administration, said the telescope's reign will continue for a long time, carrying enough fuel to run for at least 20 years.
Astronomers didn't fully appreciate how much influence young stars have on their surroundings until Webb peered into this cluster, one of the closest regions to Earth of new massive stars.
The image shows it clearly: Rather than star birth being a gentle process hidden in a nest of clouds, the massive babies act like tropical storms, violently disrupting their environments by igniting or shutting down star formation. Some of these newborns are nearly eight times hotter than the sun.
The towering, fingerlike structures of dust and gas extend from the glowing wall of gas, pointing toward the hot, young stars that shaped them. New stars are emerging within. The tallest finger is enormous, with a tip more than 200 times as wide as our solar system, according to NASA. And this image is only a small section of the nebula, which extends far beyond this frame.
The image also reveals thousands of stars ranging in color and size. The ones showcasing six-point spikes — diffraction caused by how light bends around Webb's mirrors — are the most massive stars in the cluster. Perhaps thousands of smaller stars appear as white, yellow, or red, depending on their type and the amount of dust obscuring them.
At the center of the cluster is Pismis 24-1. Scientists once thought this object was the most massive star they had ever observed. They later realized what appeared to be one mega star was at least two. Still, at 74 and 66 times heavier than the sun each, the two known stars that compose Pismis 24-1 are among the most massive and luminous ever discovered.
