NASA - James Webb Space Telescope - Updates Thread

[jacqmans]

Webb reveals new details and mysteries in Jupiter’s aurora
12/05/2025

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured new details of the auroras on our Solar System’s largest planet. The dancing lights observed on Jupiter are hundreds of times brighter than those seen on Earth. With Webb’s advanced sensitivity, astronomers have studied the phenomena to better understand Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

The auroras are created when high-energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with atoms of gas. Not only are the auroras on Jupiter huge in size, they are also hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth. Here, auroras are caused by solar storms – when charged particles rain down on the upper atmosphere, excite gases and cause them to glow colours of red, green and purple. Meanwhile, Jupiter has an additional source for its auroras; the strong magnetic field of the gas giant grabs charged particles from its surroundings. This includes not only the charged particles within the solar wind but also the particles thrown into space by its orbiting moon Io, known for its numerous and large volcanoes. Io’s volcanoes spew particles that, remarkably, escape the moon’s gravity and orbit Jupiter. A barrage of charged particles unleashed by the sun during solar storms also reaches the planet. Jupiter’s large and powerful magnetic field captures charged particles and accelerates them to tremendous speeds. These speedy particles slam into the planet’s atmosphere at high energies, which excites the gas and causes it to glow.

Now, Webb’s unique capabilities are providing new insights into the auroras on Jupiter. The telescope’s sensitivity allows astronomers to increase the shutter speed in order to capture fast-varying auroral features. New data was captured with Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) on Christmas Day 2023 by a team of scientists led by Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.

“What a Christmas present it was – it just blew me away!” shared Jonathan. “We wanted to see how quickly the auroras change, expecting it to fade in and out ponderously, perhaps over a quarter of an hour or so. Instead we observed the whole auroral region fizzing and popping with light, sometimes varying by the second.”

The team’s data found that the emission from the trihydrogen ion, known as H3+, is far more variable than previously believed. The observations will help develop scientists’ understanding of how Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is heated and cooled.

The team also uncovered some unexplained observations in their data.

“What made these observations even more special is that we also took pictures simultaneously in the ultraviolet with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope,” added Jonathan. “Bizarrely, the brightest light observed by Webb had no real counterpart in Hubble’s pictures. This has left us scratching our heads. In order to cause the combination of brightness seen by both Webb and Hubble, we need to have an apparently impossible combination of high quantities of very low energy particles hitting the atmosphere – like a tempest of drizzle! We still don’t understand how this happens.”

The team now plans to study this discrepancy between the Hubble and Webb data and to explore the wider implications for Jupiter’s atmosphere and space environment. They also intend to follow up this research with more Webb observations, which they can compare with data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft to better explore the cause of the enigmatic bright emission.

These insights may also support the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, which is en route to Jupiter to make detailed observations of the giant gas planet and its three large ocean-bearing moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Juice will take a look at Jupiter's auroras with seven unique scientific instruments, including two imagers. These close-up measurements will help us understand how the planet's magnetic field and atmosphere interact, as well as the effect that charged particles from Io and the other moons have on Jupiter's atmosphere.

These results were obtained from data using Webb’s Cycle 2 observing programme #4566 and Hubble’s observing programme #17471. The results were published today in Nature Communications.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_reveals_new_details_and_mysteries_in_Jupiter_s_aurora#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=1f13e24c-bacd-4cd9-b7ac-d2e73d590100

[jacqmans]

Webb glimpses the distant past
27/05/2025

The eye is first drawn, in this new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month, to the central mega-monster that is galaxy cluster Abell S1063. This behemoth collection of galaxies, lying 4.5 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Grus (the Crane), dominates the scene. Looking more closely, this dense collection of heavy galaxies is surrounded by glowing streaks of light, and these warped arcs are the true object of scientists’ interest: faint galaxies from the Universe’s distant past.

Abell S1063 was previously observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Frontier Fields programme. It features a strong gravitational lens: the galaxy cluster is so massive that the light of distant galaxies aligned behind it is bent around it, creating the warped arcs that we see here. Like a glass lens, it focuses the light from these faraway galaxies. The resulting images, albeit distorted, are both bright and magnified – enough to be observed and studied. This was the aim of Hubble’s observations, using the galaxy cluster as a magnifying glass to investigate the early Universe.

The new imagery from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) takes this quest even further back in time. This image showcases an incredible forest of lensing arcs around Abell S1063, which reveal distorted background galaxies at a range of cosmic distances, along with a multitude of faint galaxies and previously unseen features.

This image is what’s known as a deep field – a long exposure of a single area of the sky, collecting as much light as possible to draw out the most faint and distant galaxies that don’t appear in ordinary images. With 9 separate snapshots of different near-infrared wavelengths of light, totalling around 120 hours of observing time and aided by the magnifying effect of gravitational lensing, this is Webb’s deepest gaze on a single target to date. Focusing such observing power on a massive gravitational lens, like Abell S1063, therefore has the potential to reveal some of the very first galaxies formed in the early Universe.

The observing programme that produced this data, GLIMPSE (#3293, PIs: H. Atek & J. Chisholm), aims to probe the period known as Cosmic Dawn, when the Universe was only a few million years old.

[Image Description: A field of galaxies in space, dominated by an enormous, bright-white elliptical galaxy that is the core of a massive galaxy cluster. Many other elliptical galaxies can be seen around it. Also around it are short, curved, glowing red lines, which are images of distant background galaxies magnified and warped by gravitational lensing. A couple of foreground stars appear large and bright with long spikes around them.]

[Star One]

Coming June 2025 to NASA+, YouTube, and other platforms, the original documentary film "Cosmic Dawn" takes you behind the scenes of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Relive the pitfalls and the triumphs of the world's most powerful space telescope—from developing the idea of an impossible machine to watching with bated breath as it unfolded, hurtling through space a million miles away from Earth.

You've seen the universe through the eyes of Webb. Now discover how this technological marvel came about through the eyes of the scientists, engineers, and dreamers who made it possible.

Credit: NASA

[JulesVerneATV]

Webb was able to help refine, by nearly 20%, our knowledge of the asteroid 2024 YR4’s orbit, and the (super tiny) odds of it impacting the Moon in 2032.
https://x.com/NASAWebb/status/1930754519891055087#m

and maybe a future target?
Cosmic Himalayas Quasar Cluster Defies Explanation (IMAGE)
https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/1076419

great news that JWST will not be impacted by NASA cuts, it has revolutionized astronomy as the Hubble Telescope has done. Will JWST answer questions or create more questions to be answered, all those strange cosmology questions, why are stars and Galaxies under going unusual luminosity changes,  are there worlds out there with alien signatures, why are media and science people now saying Galaxies are older than the Universe...does it mean Cosmology got its mathematics wrong and the science books will have to be looked at?  dark matter (solely) responsible is there something going on with proton rich nucleogenesis of these rare isotopes? how common are life signatures and Solar System-like planetary systems? why are all these Jumbos out there, Jupiter-mass Binary Objects? how did the most distant quasars grow so big, are the models wrong? Webb's Orbit at Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2)  can begin to look at observations made from Earth representative of observations from the other positions in the universe, at perspective like Gaia and step beyond the Copernican principle? the diameter of the observable universe is approximately 93 billion light-years but what is the size of the whole universe? is there another universe of 'Anti Matter' out there and why is there far more matter than antimatter in the observable universe?
JWST having studies of nearby Asteroids, local Comets, Extra Solar planets and Exoplanet Systems, White dwarfs, Active galactic nuclei, Starburst galaxies, High-redshift galaxies, Compact galaxies, confirm theories  on gravity waves or hypothetical elementary particles or gravitational lensing, Primordial galaxies, proto-planetary systems and Circumstellar disks, Dwarf Stars, Planetary nebulae, planets of our own Solar system.
So far huge insights into the early universe, the strange signatures in atmospheres of exoplanets, and the info on formation of stars and galaxies.

[JulesVerneATV]

1.5 TB of James Webb Space Telescope data just hit the internet
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/09/jwst_open_science_data/
Online catalog gives open science access to data from early universe

A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date.

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide.

As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.

[jacqmans]

Webb spots a starburst shining in infrared
30/06/2025

Featured in this NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month is a nearby galaxy that outshines the Milky Way. This galaxy, called Messier 82 (M82) or the Cigar Galaxy, is situated just 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.

Despite being smaller than the Milky Way, M82 is five times as luminous as our home galaxy and forms stars ten times faster. M82 is classified as a starburst galaxy because it is forming new stars at a rate much faster than expected for a galaxy of its size, especially at its centre.

In visible-light images of M82, the central hotbed of activity is obscured by a network of thick and dusty clouds, but Webb’s infrared eyes are designed to peer through this cloudy veil and reveal the activity behind them.

What caused M82’s burst of star formation? The answer likely lies with its neighbour, the larger spiral galaxy M81. Researchers suspect that the two galaxies have interacted gravitationally, sending gas pouring into M82’s centre millions of years ago. The influx of gas provided the raw material for new stars to form – and form they did! M82 is home to more than 100 super star clusters, some of which are still in the process of forming and are blanketed with dense, dusty gas. Super star clusters are more massive and luminous than typical star clusters; these ones each contain around 100 000 stars.

A previous Webb image of M82, featuring data from its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), was released in 2024. The earlier image focused on the very core of the galaxy, where individual clusters of young stars stand out against the clumps and tendrils of gas.

This new image from Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) provides a remarkable, mostly starless view of M82. The image is instead dominated by the emission from warm dust and intricate clouds of sooty organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs.

The emission from the PAH molecules traces the galaxy’s broad outflows, which are launched by the intense radiation and winds from the hot young stars of the central super star clusters. Though super star clusters are the source of M82’s powerful galactic winds, the winds may spell the end for the galaxy’s starburst era: as the winds billow into intergalactic space, they likely carry with them the cool gas needed to form even more stars.

[Image description: An image of the central part of galaxy M82. Its disc, a narrow bar from the top to the bottom of the image, can be seen by its intense blue-white glow. Thick clouds of gas cover the scene, erupting from the galaxy’s core out to the left and right. The gas is mostly pale red in colour and richly textured, with ridges and cavities visible in great detail. A few stars in M82 are visible scattered across the gas.]

[JulesVerneATV]

Tiny Red Sources and the Big Questions They Raise, Little red dots (LRDs) are a class of small, red-tinted galaxies




,

https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/jwst-fully-solves-the-mystery-of-little-red-dots-f426f0e067bc

[SMS]

Shining Science @ShiningScience
7 lip
The beautiful planet Saturn taken by the James Webb Space Telescope!

https://twitter.com/ShiningScience/status/1942011430032556148

[JulesVerneATV]

Early galaxies—or something else? Webb uncovers 300 unusually bright objects
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-early-galaxies-webb-uncovers-unusually.html
University of Missouri research team, led by Haojing Yan and Bangzheng "Tom" Sun, has used the JWST to identify 300 extremely bright, early universe candidate galaxies that challenge existing formation models.
spectral energy distribution analysis shows that these objects are dominated by low-redshift  galaxies  a non-negligible fraction could be at high redshifts. Seven of our objects have secure spectroscopic redshifts from JWST NIRSpec identifications

In the past, scientists often thought these extremely bright objects weren't early galaxies, but something else that mimicked them. However, based on their findings, Sun and Yan believe these objects deserve a closer look—and shouldn't be so quickly ruled out.

when full spectroscopic data is unavailable, researchers can use a technique called spectral energy distribution fitting. This method gave Sun and Yan a baseline to estimate the redshifts of their galaxy candidates—along with other properties such as age and mass.

[Targeteer]

https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1957821207224463830

[jacqmans]

Webb investigates complex heart of a cosmic butterfly
27/08/2025

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details in the core of the Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302. From the dense, dusty torus that surrounds the star hidden at the centre of the nebula to its outflowing jets, the Webb observations reveal many new discoveries that paint a never-before-seen portrait of a dynamic and structured planetary nebula.

The Butterfly Nebula, located about 3400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is one of the best-studied planetary nebulae in our galaxy. This stunning nebula was previously imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Now, Webb has captured a new view of this nebula.

Planetary nebulae are among the most beautiful and most elusive creatures in the cosmic zoo. These nebulae form when stars with masses between about 0.8 and 8 times the mass of the Sun shed most of their mass at the end of their lives. The planetary nebula phase is fleeting, lasting only about 20 000 years.

Contrary to the name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets: the naming confusion began several hundred years ago, when astronomers reported that these nebulae appeared round, like planets. The name stuck, even though many planetary nebulae aren’t round at all – and the Butterfly Nebula is a prime example of the fantastic shapes that these nebulae can take.

The Butterfly Nebula is a bipolar nebula, meaning that it has two lobes that spread in opposite directions, forming the ‘wings’ of the butterfly. A dark band of dusty gas poses as the butterfly’s ‘body’. This band is actually a doughnut-shaped torus that’s being viewed from the side, hiding the nebula’s central star – the ancient core of a Sun-like star that energises the nebula and causes it to glow. The dusty doughnut may be responsible for the nebula’s insectoid shape by preventing gas from flowing outward from the star equally in all directions.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_investigates_complex_heart_of_a_cosmic_butterfly#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=1246a76a-e169-4aa5-aa53-f79286fb0000

[Targeteer]

https://twitter.com/SETIInstitute/status/1960356616525566384

[Blackstar]

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-136

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2025/136/01K2JB2E4SSMC8Y7BGYE8N96TM?news=true

Feel free to download the 122 megabyte version if you want.

[JulesVerneATV]

Has JWST Finally Found an Exomoon?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/jwst-finally-found-exomoon-160000216.html

[Targeteer]

https://twitter.com/ExploreCosmos_/status/1979858298456228001

This is how scientists sharpened the vision of the  #JWST, which lies about 1.5 million kilometres away and cannot be serviced directly. 

They used a special mode called the aperture-masking interferometer (AMI), a precisely-machined metal plate inserted into one of Webb’s cameras, to diagnose and correct both optical and electronic distortions in the telescope’s imagery.

Despite its spectacular launch and initial images, the team found that at the pixel-level resolution required for truly faint companions (like exoplanets or brown dwarfs beside bright stars), the images were slightly blurred due to an unexpected electronic effect: brighter pixels “leaking” into darker ones in the infrared detector, compounding small mirror-surface or alignment imperfections. 

To tackle this, researchers from the University of Sydney built a computer and machine-learning model that simultaneously simulated the optical pathways and the detector behaviour, then applied it to calibrate and undo the blurring during data processing.

The results were impressive: the corrected data revealed previously hard-to-detect objects, for example in the system around the star HD 206893, both a faint planet and the reddest known brown dwarf became clear. 

Furthermore, the trick worked not just for “dots” (point-sources) but for more complex scenes: they picked out volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io in a time-lapse, and traced a jet from the black hole in the galaxy NGC 1068 with resolution comparable to much larger telescopes.

By combining precise calibration of the optics and electronics of an instrument millions of kilometres away, this work opens up the possibility of using Webb’s highest-resolution mode to discover Earth-like planets or other faint features that were previously beyond reach.

[jacqmans]

The Red Spider Nebula, caught by Webb
28/10/2025

This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a cosmic creepy-crawly called NGC 6537 – the Red Spider Nebula. Using its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Webb has revealed never-before-seen details in this picturesque planetary nebula with a rich backdrop of thousands of stars.

Planetary nebulae like the Red Spider Nebula form when ordinary stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives. After ballooning into cool red giants, these stars shed their outer layers and cast them into space, exposing their white-hot cores. Ultraviolet light from the central star ionises the cast-off material, causing it to glow. The planetary nebula phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.

The central star of the Red Spider Nebula is visible in this image, glowing just brighter than the webs of dusty gas that surround it. The surprising nature of the nebula’s tremendously hot and luminous central star has been revealed by Webb’s NIRCam. In optical-wavelength images, such as from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the star appears faint and blue. But in the NIRCam images, it shows up as red: thanks to its sensitive near-infrared capabilities, Webb has revealed a shroud of hot dust surrounding the central star. This hot dust likely orbits the central star, in a disc structure.

Though only a single star is visible in the Red Spider’s heart, a hidden companion star may lurk there as well. A stellar companion could explain the nebula’s shape, including its characteristic narrow waist and wide outflows. This hourglass shape is seen in other planetary nebulae such as the Butterfly Nebula, which Webb also recently observed.

Webb’s new view of the Red Spider Nebula reveals for the first time the full extent of the nebula’s outstretched lobes, which form the ‘legs’ of the spider. These lobes, shown in blue, are traced by light emitted from H2 molecules, which contain two hydrogen atoms bonded together. Stretching over the entirety of NIRCam’s field of view, these lobes are shown to be closed, bubble-like structures that each extend about three light-years. Outflowing gas from the centre of the nebula has inflated these massive bubbles over thousands of years.

Gas is also actively jetting out from the nebula’s centre, as these new Webb observations show. An elongated purple ‘S’ shape centred on the heart of the nebula follows the light from ionised iron atoms. This feature marks where a fast-moving jet has emerged from near the nebula’s central star and collided with material that was previously cast away by the star, sculpting the rippling structure of the nebula seen today.

The observations used to create this image come from Webb GO programme #4571 (PI: J. Kastner), which aims to understand how bipolar planetary nebulae like the Red Spider Nebula are shaped by the outflows and jets that emerge from the stars at their cores.

[Image Description: A large planetary nebula. The nebula’s central star is hidden by a blotchy pinkish cloud of dust. A strong red light radiates from this area, illuminating the nearby dust. Two large loops extend diagonally away from the centre, formed of thin ridges of molecular gas, here coloured blue. They stretch out to the corners of the view. A huge number of bright, whitish stars cover the background, also easily visible through the thin dust layers.]

[JulesVerneATV]

The Red Spider Nebula, caught by Webb

ESA also has a twitter/X account posting NASA Webb news and updates during the shutdown

Webb’s new view of the nebula reveals for the first time the full extent of its outstretched lobes, which form the ‘legs’ of the spider.
https://x.com/ESA_Webb/status/1983156929380634867#m

[JulesVerneATV]

Webb reveals new details and mysteries in Jupiter’s aurora

some more planetary science within our own solar system

JWST/NIRSpec Detection of Complex Structures in Saturn's Sub-Auroral Ionosphere and Stratosphere
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL116491

[jacqmans]

Webb observes a dance of dwarf galaxies
02/12/2025

For this new ESA/Webb Picture of the Month, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has spied a pair of dwarf galaxies engaged in a gravitational dance. These two galaxies are named NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, and they’re located about 24 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). Aside from the Milky Way’s own dwarf companions (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds), this is the closest known interacting dwarf-dwarf system where astronomers have directly observed both a gas bridge and resolved stellar populations. Together, NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 form the system Arp 269, which is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. At such a close distance (and with Webb’s impressive ability to peer through dusty cosmic clouds), these galaxies allow astronomers to witness up close the kinds of galaxy interactions that were common billions of years ago.

Dwarf galaxies likely share many similarities with young galaxies in the early Universe: they are much less massive than galaxies like the Milky Way, they typically have small amounts of metals (what astronomers call elements heavier than helium), and they contain a lot of gas and relatively few stars. When nearby dwarf galaxies collide, merge, or steal gas from one another, it can tell us how galaxies billions of years ago might have grown and evolved.

The nearby dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 form an intriguing pair. Nearly three decades ago, astronomers discovered a wispy bridge of gas connecting the two galaxies, showing that they have interacted in the past. Despite many studies with powerful telescopes like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the history between NGC4490 and NGC 4485 has remained mysterious.

Recently, Webb observed this curious galactic pair as part of the Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers (FEAST) programme (#1783; PI: A. Adamo). The FEAST programme used Webb’s sensitive infrared eyes to reveal the formation of new stars in different types of nearby galaxies.

This image was developed using data from Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), as well as a single narrow-band filter from Hubble (657N). It reveals NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 in never-before-seen detail and illuminates the bridge of gas and stars that connects them. NGC 4490 dominates the image as the larger object occupying the left side of the image, while NGC 4485 is the smaller galaxy that hosts the top-right portion of the image. By dissecting these galaxies star by star, researchers were able to map out where young, middle-aged, and old stars reside, and trace the timeline of the galaxies’ interaction.

Roughly 200 million years ago, these galaxies whirled close to one another before waltzing away. The larger galaxy, NGC 4490, ensnared a stream of gas from its companion, and this gas now trails between the galaxies like dancers connected by outstretched arms. Along the newly formed bridge of gas and within the two galaxies, this interaction spurred a burst of new stars. The concentrated areas of bright blue that appear throughout the field indicate highly ionised regions of gas by the recently formed star clusters. Just 30 million years ago, these galaxies burst alight with stars once more, with new clusters coalescing where the gas of the two galaxies mixed together.

By capturing the history of the galactic dancers NGC 4490 and NGC 4485, Webb has revealed new details in how dwarf galaxies interact, giving us a glimpse of how small galaxies near and far grow and evolve.

[Image Description: This Webb image shows two interacting galaxies. NGC 4490 occupies the left side of the image, while NGC 4485 appears as a white glowing hue in the top right of the field. Both galaxies are connected by a bright stream of red stretching from the top left of the image, through the bottom centre, and ending at the right under galaxy NGC 4485. There are regions of bright blue ionised gas visible in concentrated areas of the red stream. The background is black with multiple galaxies in various shapes throughout.]

[jacqmans]

Webb: Dwarf stars in a glittering sky
19/12/2025

The final ESA/Webb Picture of the Month feature for 2025 showcases a festive-looking region filled with glowing clouds of gas and thousands of sparkling stars. This star cluster, known as Westerlund 2, resides in a stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20 000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina (the Keel).

This image of Westerlund 2 uses data from NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). The cluster measures between 6 light-years and 13 light-years across, and is host to some of our Milky Way galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars. It was also the feature of Hubble’s 25th anniversary image in 2015.
This new Webb image captures the bright, brilliant cluster near the top that is packed with young, massive stars whose intense light shapes the entire scene. Below and around them, swirls of orange and red gas form sculpted walls and tangled clouds – material that is being pushed, eroded, and illuminated by the cluster’s powerful radiation. Threaded throughout the view are countless tiny stars just beginning to shine, some still surrounded by the gas and dust from which they formed. The soft blues and pinks are wisps of thinner material drifting between the denser clouds. Scattered across the field are also many bright stars much closer to us, whose sharp, star-shaped patterns are created by Webb’s optics. The result is a vivid portrait of a stellar nursery in action, where intense energy from newborn stars carves dramatic shapes into the surrounding nebula and drives the ongoing cycle of star formation.

These new Webb observations of Westerlund 2 have revealed, for the first time, the full population of brown dwarfs in this extremely massive young star cluster, including objects as small as about 10 times the mass of Jupiter. This data is allowing astronomers to find several hundred stars with discs in various evolutionary states to facilitate our understanding of how discs evolve and how planets form in such massive young clusters. This image was developed using data from Webb’s programme #3523 (M. Guarcello) as part of the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey (EWOCS).

[Image Description: A cluster of stars inside a large nebula. The clouds of gas and dust are predominantly bright red in colour and wispy, akin to flames. They are clumped in the bottom-left corner. Other clouds, deeper in the cluster behind many of the stars, appear pale pink. The stars are concentrated in the top half of the image and are mostly small, bright white and six-pointed. They cast blue light over the nebula. Other stars with very long spikes surrounding them lie in the foreground.]