Did you notice that the bright red clumpy lines in the upper left are inclined in the same direction and at the same angle? These are aligned protostellar outflows, or jets of gas from newborn stars. NASAWebb captures this phenomenon for the first time.

‘Astronomers have long hypothesised that as clouds collapse, stars will tend to rotate in the same direction as they formed,’ said lead researcher Klaus Pontoppidan of NASA JPL. However, this has never been seen so clearly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way stars are born.’

Previously, these objects were seen as blobs or invisible at optical wavelengths. Webb's sensitive infrared vision can pierce through the thick dust to reveal the stars and their outflows.

This region is part of the Serpens Nebula. Located 1,300 light years from Earth, this nebula is quite young on a cosmic scale, only 1-2 million years old! At the centre of this image is a densely packed cluster of newly formed stars (about 100,000 years old).

Image description:

A young star-forming region, filled with layers of orange, red and blue coloured gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is largely covered by orange dust, and within this orange dust are several small clouds of red gas, extending from the upper left to the lower right at the same angle. The centre of the image is mostly filled with blue gas. In the centre is a particularly bright star with an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of this is a vertical eye-shaped slit with a bright star in the centre. The gas to the right of the slit is darker orange. Small points of light are interspersed throughout the field, with the brightest sources in the field having the eight-pointed diffraction spikes characteristic of the Webb Telescope.