Colorful new stars shine in latest Webb telescope image - CNN

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A pair of rambunctious young stars takes center stage in a new near-infrared image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The two stars, which are still actively forming and closely orbiting one another, are called Herbig-Haro 46/47 and can be found 1,470 light-years away in the Vela constellation.

Although the stellar duo has been studied and observed by many space and ground-based telescopes since the 1950s, Webb has taken the most detailed and highest-resolution image in near-infrared light. The telescope’s capabilities allow it to peer through an otherwise obscuring nebula, filled with gas and dust, that surrounds the stars. In visible-light images taken by other telescopes, the blue nebula has actually looked black.

The first anniversary image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it's never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you'd never know it from Webb's chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems. The young stars at the center of many of these disks are similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller. The heftiest in this image is the star S1, which appears amid a glowing cave it is carving out with its stellar winds in the lower half of the image. The lighter-colored gas surrounding S1 consists of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a family of carbon-based molecules that are among the most common compounds found in space.

Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA/ESA/CSA/Klaus Pontoppidan

Webb telescope shares stunning new image of star birth to mark its first anniversary

The stars have been releasing jets of material into space for thousands of years.

The stellar pair can be seen as the orange-white center at the intersection of the red and pink spikes in the image, located deep within an invisible disk of gas and dust that feeds star formation. The only hint of the existence of this disk is in the two darker cone-shaped regions around the stars.

Two orange regions that span out from the stars represent material released by Herbig-Haro 46/47 as they go through a continuous cycle of pulling in and ejecting gas and dust across millennia.

The regions change shape over time as new ejections, seen in blue threads, collide with the older ejected material, creating wavy patterns seen on the right side and curly blue lines on the left.

The larger blue cloud represents the nebula itself, made transparent thanks to Webb’s ability to see through dense gas and dust. The Webb image also showcases a variety of stars and galaxies around and behind the nebula.

The two stars will ultimately finish forming over millions of years, and the brilliantly hued features in the Webb image will diminish as the binary star pair brightens.

The space telescope’s peek at this critical moment in the stellar life cycle will allow astronomers to understand more details about how stars form and evolve over time.

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