Stars hidden inside a dusty cloud become visible in a new infrared view of NGC 7129. The James Webb Space Telescope image, released on October 6 and featured again by NASA on October 20, shows a region about 3,300 light-years away.
The picture is more than a collection of bright points. Forming stars eject material into their surroundings, producing jets and shocks that reveal how the young system interacts with its cloud.
Dust can hide these objects from telescopes observing visible light. Webb's sensitivity to infrared wavelengths gives astronomers another way to look through the cloud and examine different stages of star formation.
The colors carry physical information, but are not a natural-color view from a human eye. NASA identifies the golden region with hot atomic hydrogen. Red marks cooler molecular hydrogen shocked by embedded protostars, the objects still forming into stars.
Near the center sits LkH(alpha) 234, a pre-main-sequence star with about five to eight times the Sun's mass. It has largely finished collecting material and is contracting under gravity, according to NASA's description.
The prominent spikes around bright stars also need interpretation. They are a diffraction pattern produced by the telescope's optics, rather than long structures extending from those stars.
The scene puts different processes in the same frame: hidden stars, illuminated gas and outflows moving through a cloud. The red structures trace activity inside the dust.
