Latest images from the Webb telescope present a new look at the vast universe

Make a wish — here are a half-million stars to choose from when you’re making it.

The latest image from NASA’s James Webb telescope, released on Monday, looks deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, showing a cluster of “baby” stars glowing within a dusty cloud. At the heart of the cluster is a still-forming star more than 30 times the mass of the sun.

The colored cyan area is a previously unseen region of ionized hydrogen gas.

The Webb telescope’s ability to view the universe in infrared light, invisible to the human eye, has allowed it to capture never-before seen details in space. This image, the full view of the telescope’s near-infrared camera, is 50 light years — or 9.3 million miles — wide.

Here are a few more recent Webb images. See the full gallery at Science.NASA.gov.

NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

The main image of this release features a glimpse of a black hole in an early stage of its development, just 470 million years after the Big Bang.

The infrared image shows data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. It features scores of seemingly tiny celestial objects in a sea of black. This is the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. When magnified, the tiny white, orange, and purple celestial objects are revealed to be spiral and elliptical galaxies, and gleaming stars.

Just to the right of center, is a tiny orange speck. This speck is far in the distance, well beyond the Abell galaxy cluster. It represents a galaxy 13.2 billion light-years from Earth containing a supermassive black hole.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team

A close-up view of a barred spiral galaxy. Two spiral arms reach horizontally away from the white-yellow center of the galaxy, merging into a broad network of gas and dust filling the image. This fiery material glows brightest orange along the path of the arms, and is darker red across the rest of the galaxy. Through many gaps in the dust, countless tiny stars can be seen in blue, most densely around the core.

This is a close-up view of a barred spiral galaxy. Two spiral arms reach horizontally away from the white-yellow center of the galaxy, merging into a broad network of gas and dust filling the image. This fiery material glows brightest orange along the path of the arms, and is darker red across the rest of the galaxy. Through many gaps in the dust, countless tiny stars can be seen in blue, most densely around the core.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Temim (Princeton University)

The Crab Nebula, seen here, is an oval nebula with complex structures. On the nebula’s exterior, particularly at the top left and bottom left, lie curtains of glowing red and orange fluffy material. Its interior shell shows large-scale loops of mottled filaments of yellow-white and green, studded with clumps and knots. Translucent thin ribbons of smoky white lie within the remnant’s interior, brightest toward its center.

Six-thousand-five-hundred light years from Earth lies the Crab Nebula, the remains of an exploded star. While this target has been well-studied by multiple observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s infrared sensitivity and resolution offer new clues into the makeup and origins of this scene.

Translucent thin ribbons of smoky white lie within the remnant’s interior, brightest toward its center. The white material follows different directions throughout, including sometimes sharply curving away from certain regions within the remnant. A faint, wispy ring of white material encircles the very center of the nebula. Around and within the supernova remnant are many points of blue, red, and yellow light.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Nolan Habel (NASA-JPL). Image Processing: Patrick Kavanagh (Maynooth University)

The telescope captured this spectral view of star-forming region NGC 346 in mid-infrared light. The blue tendrils represent silicates and sooty chemical molecules, while the red glow represents warm dust heated by the brightest and most massive stars at the heart of the region. This area is also abundant with baby stars still embedded in their dusty cocoons.

NGC 346 is part of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It has a composition much closer to that of galaxies from the early universe and possesses fewer heavy elements. Accordingly, scientists did not expect much cosmic dust, which is formed by heavy elements. However, both Webb’s new mid-infrared look at NGC 346 and its past near-infrared view show plenty of dust present.

NASA, ESA, CSA / Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

This image shows the full survey of the inner Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster made using the NIRCam instrument on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This is the short-wavelength colour composite, which reveals the nebula, its stars, and many other objects in unprecedented detail in the infrared.

One of the brightest nebulae in the night sky is Messier 42, the Orion Nebula, located south of Orion’s belt. At its core is the young Trapezium Cluster of stars, the most massive of which illuminate the surrounding gas and dust with their intense ultraviolet radiation fields, while proto-stars continue to form today in the OMC-1 molecular cloud behind.

The new imaging was obtained with Webb’s near-infrared camera, NIRCam, and has been made into two mosaics, one each from the short and long wavelength channels. These are among the largest Webb mosaics observed to date and given the high resolution and large area, they have been incorporated in ESASky to enable easy exploration of the plethora of interesting astronomical sources contained within them.