Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2023

14 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2023 ASTRO PUBLISHING into space like a newborn first stretching her arms out into the world. In contrast, a star has carved out a glowing cave of dust in the lower half of the image. It is the only star in the image that is signifi- cantly more massive than the Sun. “Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi al- lows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clar- ity. Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another star’s story,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, who served as Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, since before the telescope’s launch and through the first year of operations. Some stars in the image display tell- tale shadows indicating protoplane- tary disks – potential future plane- tary systems in the making. T his video tours a portion of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star- forming region to Earth. The image was taken to celebrate the first anniver- sary of the start of science operations for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future plane- tary systems. Once our entire solar system, encompassing the entire history of life as we know it, would have appeared something like this if seen from a dis- tance. At bottom, a glowing cave of dust dominates the image. It was carved out by a star at the center of the cavity – the only star in the image that is signifi- cantly more massive than our Sun. [NASA, ESA, CSA, Greg Bacon (STScI)] T he complex star and nebular field around Rho Ophiuchi. [NASA, ESA, CSA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI). Acknowledgment IPAC, Caltech, Akira Fujii DSS] when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets ing space. “On its first anniversary, the James Webb Space Telescope has already delivered upon its prom- ise to unfold the universe, gifting humanity with a breathtaking treas- ure trove of images and science that will last for decades,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “An engineering marvel built by the world’s leading scientists and engineers, Webb has given us a more intricate under- standing of galaxies, stars, and the atmospheres of planets outside of our solar system than ever before, laying the groundwork for NASA to lead the world in a new era of scien- tific discovery and the search for habitable worlds.” Webb’s image shows a region con- taining approximately 50 young stars, all of them similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller. The darkest areas are the densest, where thick dust cocoons still-forming proto- stars. Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, represented in red, dom- inate the image, appearing horizon- tally across the upper third and vertically on the right. These occur !