NASA’s James Webb captures ‘sharpest’ images of the Horsehead Nebula, located 1,300 light-years away from Earth

NASA’s high-definition, “heat-vision” James Webb Space Telescope has just captured the most detailed images yet of the Horsehead Nebula’s wavy “moons.”

For more than a century, astronomers have marveled at the iconic nebula – a dense and distant cloud of gaseous particles that serves as a nursery for new stars.

“These observations show the top of the ‘horse’s mane’ or edge of this iconic nebula,” a NASA spokesperson said, “and capture the complexity of the region with unprecedented spatial resolution.”

One of the new infrared images from the James Webb telescope captures in a sharp color distribution the area where a gas changes from cold hydrogen molecules (blue) into energetic, ‘ionized’ hydrogen atoms (red).

The second image shows very detailed mid-infrared light, as this heat was emitted by dusty quartz-like silicate particles and ‘sooty’ hydrocarbon molecules, which form the deep space clouds of the Horsehead Nebula’s moons.

A second image (above) shows very detailed mid-infrared light, as the light was emitted by the dusty quartz-like silicate particles and ‘sooty’ hydrocarbons that make up the nebula’s horse-like moons. These ‘moons’ on the nebula’s chess knight silhouette are almost 0.8 light-years long

According to NASA, the nebula is what astrophysicists call a “photodissociation region, or PDR,” in which ultraviolet (UV) light from young and massive stars creates a bubble of reactive neutral, warm gas and dust, enveloped by more ionized gases.

“As UV light evaporates the dust cloud, dust particles are swept out of the cloud and carried along with the heated gas,” NASA said in a statement. rack in the new photos.

“Webb has detected a network of sparse features that track this movement,” she added.

‘The observations have also allowed astronomers to investigate how the dust blocks and emits light and better understand the multi-dimensional shape of the nebula.’

Ever since a Scottish astronomer first discovered its chess knight silhouette in 1888, the iconic Horsehead Nebula has graced astronomy books, often bathed in UV radiation from the very bright star Sigma Orionis, visible above.

Ever since a Scottish astronomer first discovered it in 1888, the iconic Horsehead Nebula (above) has graced astronomy books, often bathed in UV radiation from the very bright star Sigma Orionis above. Above is a 2023 image of the nebula taken by the Euclid spacecraft

The nebula is a favorite target for both professional and amateur astronomers, including East Ayrshire-born Bryan Shaw, who has achieved fame by capturing stunning images of nebulae and star clusters from his garden in Great Britain.

Nebulae are often named based on what scientists see as similarities to objects or characters on Earth, including a cat’s paw, a tarantula and a veil.

Astronomers have also spotted a black widow spider, a Halloween lantern, a snake, a visible human brain and the Starship Enterprise, among others.

NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Telescope, a partnership with European and Canadian space agencies, is being described as a “time machine” that could help unlock the secrets of our universe.

The telescope was built to look back at the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, to observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our own solar system.

The James Webb telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of about 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 degrees Celsius).

It is the world’s largest and most powerful orbital space telescope, able to look back 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will work together for the early years of its life cycle.

Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 via the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Since then, it has been orbiting the Earth at a speed of about 27,300 kilometers per hour in a low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 550 kilometers.