Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2024

37 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2024 years old), seen at the center of this image. Some of these stars will eventually grow to the mass of our Sun. “Webb is a young stellar object- finding machine,” Green said. “In this field, we pick up sign posts of every single young star, down to the lowest mass stars.” “It’s a very complete picture we’re seeing now,” added Pontoppidan. So, throughout the region in this image, filaments and wisps of differ- ent hues represent reflected starlight from still-forming protostars within the cloud. In some areas, there is dust in front of that reflection, which appears here with an orange, diffuse shade. This region has been home to other coincidental discoveries, including the flapping “Bat Shadow,” which T his image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the Serpens Nebula, where astronomers discovered a grouping of aligned protostellar out- flows. These jets are signified by bright clumpy streaks that appear red, which are shock waves from the jet hitting surrounding gas and dust. Here, the red color represents the presence of molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA- JPL), Joel Green (STScI)] earned its name when 2020 data from NASA’s Hubble Space Tele- scope revealed a star’s planet-form- ing disk to flap, or shift. This feature is visible at the center of the Webb image. The new image, and serendipitous discovery of the aligned objects, is actually just the first step in this sci- entific program. The team will now use Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to investigate the chemical make-up of the cloud. The astronomers are interested in determining how volatile chemicals survive star and planet formation. Volatiles are compounds that subli- mate, or transition from a solid di- rectly to a gas, at a relatively low temperature – including water and carbon monoxide. They’ll then com- pare their findings to amounts found in protoplanetary disks of similar- type stars. “At the most basic form, we are all made of matter that came from these volatiles. The majority of wa- ter here on Earth originated when the Sun was an infant protostar bil- lions of years ago,” Pontoppidan said. “Looking at the abundance of these critical compounds in proto- stars just before their protoplane- tary disks have formed could help us understand how unique the circum- stances were when our own solar system formed.” !