The image of the Serpentine Nebula you see above was taken NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), not only looks amazing, but captures a phenomenon that has never been seen before. The flattened, extended “protostellar streams” seen in the upper left support the long-held theory. As suspected, the jets are ejected in an aligned fashion from rotating disks of surrounding material, proving that clusters of forming stars rotate in the same direction.
NASA he says In the upper left of the image, the bright, compact streaks that look a bit like JJ Abrams-style lens flare represent shock waves from the outward-firing jets as the interstellar gas cloud collapses inward. As the forming stars condense and rotate more rapidly, some material is ejected perpendicular to the disk.
“Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, stars tend to rotate in the same direction,” Klaus Pontoppidan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a blog post. “However, it has never been seen so directly before. “These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the main way stars are born.”
The Serpentine Nebula is only one or two million years old and lies about 1,300 light-years from Earth. NASA says the dense proto-star cluster at the center of the image includes stars less than 100,000 years old. Serpens is a reflection nebula, meaning that clouds of gas and dust shine by reflecting light from stars within or nearby.
JWST’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the image, which spans about 16 trillion miles by 11 trillion miles. The black rectangles you see in the lower left and upper left of the full image represent the missing data. NASA says its next step is to use the telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to study the chemical decay of the Serpentine Nebula.
For a closer look at the special details of the spectacular image, you can watch NASA’s instructional video below.
