Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted

Jasmine 🌌🔭

@astrojaz.bsky.social

isn’t it crazy that this stuff is just out there?

$Three bright stars with diffraction spikes shine near the center-right of the image, illuminating nearby clouds that glow in pale blue. The clouds darken at the edges of the image, and are dotted with smaller stars, some also with diffraction spikes.$

Clouds of gas and dust with many stars. The clouds form a flat, blue background toward the bottom, and become thicker and smokier toward the top. Stars on one side light the nebula. A thick arc of gas and dust reaches around from the bottom-right corner of the image toward the top-left corner. It begins as a dark and obscuring cloud at bottom right and gradually becomes brightly lit by many stars at the upper left. Other large, foreground stars lie between the nebula and the viewer.

$A portion of the young star-forming region Serpens Nebula. It’s filled with wispy orange and red layers of gas and dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. There are wispy blue filaments of glass in the bottom right corner of the image. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.$ $Hundreds of stars and galaxies in varying shapes, sizes and colors on a black background. Two of the largest, most prominent stars can be found in the top left quadrant and near the bottom right edge, respectively. They are tinged with blue and have an eight-point diffraction spike pattern. Near the center of this image is the ZS7 system, made up of a merger between two galaxies and their black holes. The ZS7 system is not easily seen by the naked eye in this image, as it looks like very small red dots.$