A cauldron of cosmic creation is being revealed in a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb has unveiled numerous stars formerly hidden by clouds of dust in a stellar nursery known as NGC 7129, which resides about 3,300 light-years from Earth.
Stars, the engines of elemental creation, have life cycles that begin with their birth in molecular clouds – cold, dense regions of dust and gas. Because of these dusty cocoons, young stars are often impossible to view by many telescopes, particularly those incapable of capturing infrared light. Webb, however, has a high degree of infrared sensitivity, allowing astronomers to peer through that dust and study the beginning of the star life cycle.
Image: NGC 7129 (NIRCam Image)
The stars from this cluster are in different stages of their development, as the more massive stars form and evolve the fastest. The most massive (and the most mature) is the region’s luminous central star, LkH(alpha) 234 (pronounced Lick-H-alpha). This star, which sports the image’s most prominent diffraction pattern, is a pre-main-sequence star weighing around 5 to 8 times the mass of our Sun. Pre-main-sequence stars like these have mostly finished gathering mass and are contracting under the force of gravity, causing their temperatures to rise. In time, this star will fuse its own hydrogen like our Sun.
The cavity to its left, which appears in gold and spans about 3.5 light-years, is the largest demonstration of the central star’s impact. Outflows from an earlier stage of the star’s life cycle carve into the dense molecular cloud of hydrogen. Both the outflows and the star’s light energize the gas, causing it to glow. While much of this hydrogen gas is blown away, a large amount is also compressed, creating the conditions for even more stars to form.
