#Chamaeleon

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed Herbig-Haro 49/50, an outflow from a nearby still-forming star, in high-resolution near- and mid-infrared light. The young star is off to the lower right corner of the Webb image.Intricate features of the outflow, represented in reddish-orange color, provide detailed clues about how young stars form and how their jet activity affects the environment around them. A chance alignment in this direction of the sky provides a beautiful juxtaposition of this nearby Herbig-Haro object (located within our Milky Way) with a face-on spiral galaxy in the distant background. Protostars are young stars in the process of formation that generally launch narrow jets of material. These jets move through the surrounding environment, in some cases extending to large distances away from the protostar. Like the water wake generated by a speeding boat, the arcs in this image are created by the fast-moving jet slamming into surrounding dust and gas. This ambient material is compressed and heats up, then cools by emitting light at visible and infrared wavelengths. In particular, the infrared light captured here by Webb highlights molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The galaxy that appears by happenstance at the tip of Herbig-Haro 49/50 is a much more distant spiral galaxy. It has a prominent central bulge represented in blue that shows the location of older stars. It also displays hints of “side lobes,” suggesting that this could be a barred-spiral galaxy. Reddish clumps within the spiral arms show the locations of warm dust and groups of forming stars. There are many more galaxies at further distances in the surrounding background, including ones that shine through the diffuse infrared glow of the nearby Herbig-Haro object.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

This image by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) features the central region of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light years away. The cold, wispy cloud material (blue, center) is illuminated in the infrared by the glow of the young, outflowing protostar Ced 110 IRS 4 (orange, upper left). The light from numerous background stars, seen as orange dots behind the cloud, can be used to detect ices in the cloud, which absorb the starlight passing through them. An international team of astronomers has reported the discovery of diverse ices in the darkest regions of a cold molecular cloud measured to date by studying this region. This result allows astronomers to examine the simple icy molecules that will be incorporated into future exoplanets, while opening a new window on the origin of more complex molecules that are the first step in the creation of the building blocks of life.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA