NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared view of the Pillars of Creation strikes a chilling tone. Thousands of stars that exist in this region disappear – and seemingly endless layers of gas and dust become the centrepiece. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope made the Pillars of Creation famous with its first image in 1995 but revisited the scene in 2014 to reveal a sharper, wider view in visible light, shown above at left. A new, near-infrared-light view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, at right, helps us peer through more of the dust in this star-forming region. The thick, dusty brown pillars are no longer as opaque and many more red stars that are still forming come into view. While the pillars of gas and dust seem darker and less penetrable in Hubble’s view, they appear more diaphanous in Webb’s. Both views show us what is happening locally. Although Hubble highlights many more thick layers of dust and Webb shows more of the stars, neither shows us the deeper universe. Dust blocks the view in Hubble’s image, but the interstellar medium plays a major role in Webb’s. It acts like thick smoke or fog, preventing us from peering into the deeper universe, where countless galaxies exist. The pillars are a small region within the Eagle Nebula, a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Hubble Heritage Project (STScI, AURA) / Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Image of the Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). A “deep dive” for buried treasure into one of Webb’s iconic First Images, the Cosmic Cliffs, has revealed a hotbed of young stars in a particularly elusive stage of development. Close analysis of data from a specific wavelength of light, only captured by Webb, is now opening new doors to intriguing finds. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

The protostar within the dark cloud L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is embedded within a cloud of material feeding its growth. Ejections from the star have cleared out cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared view. The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar “burps,” or sporadic ejections. Webb also detects filaments made of molecular hydrogen that has been shocked by past stellar ejections. The edges of the cavities at the upper left and lower right appear straight, while the boundaries at the upper right and lower left are curved. The region at the lower right appears blue, as there’s less dust between it and Webb than the orange regions above it. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI)

A portion of the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera. The image demonstrates Webb’s remarkable ability to resolve faint stars outside the Milky Way. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kristen McQuinn (RU) / Zolt G. Levay (STScI)

The Webb Space Telescope offers dramatically different views of the same scene! Each image combines near- and mid-infrared light from three filters. At left, Webb’s image of the Southern Ring Nebula highlights the very hot gas that surrounds the central stars. This hot gas is banded by a sharp ring of cooler gas, which appears in both images. At right, Webb’s image traces the star’s scattered outflows that have reached farther into the cosmos. Most of the molecular gas that lies outside the band of cooler gas is also cold. It is also far clumpier, consisting of dense knots of molecular gas that form a halo around the central stars. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Orsola De Marco (Macquarie University) / Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows IC 5332, a spiral galaxy, in unprecedented detail thanks to observations from the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). Its symmetrical spiral arms, which appear so clearly in Hubble’s ultraviolet and visible-light image of IC 5332, are revealed as a complex web of gas, emitting infrared light at a variety of temperatures. Capturing light at these wavelengths requires very specialised instruments kept at very cold temperatures, and MIRI performs spectacularly at the task. Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST and PHANGS-HST Teams

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows the heart of M74, otherwise known as the Phantom Galaxy. Webb’s sharp vision has revealed delicate filaments of gas and dust in the grandiose spiral arms which wind outwards from the centre of this image. A lack of gas in the nuclear region also provides an unobscured view of the nuclear star cluster at the galaxy’s centre. M74 is a particular class of spiral galaxy known as a ‘grand design spiral’, meaning that its spiral arms are prominent and well-defined, unlike the patchy and ragged structure seen in some spiral galaxies. ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team. Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope took simultaneous observations of the same target. These images, Hubble on left and Webb on the right, show observations of the Didymos-Dimorphos system several hours after NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) intentionally impacted the moonlet asteroid. It was the world’s first test of the kinetic impact technique using a spacecraft to deflect an asteroid by modifying its orbit. Both Webb and Hubble observed the asteroid before and after the collision took place. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jian-Yang Li (PSI), Cristina Thomas (Northern Arizona University), Ian Wong (NASA-GSFC) / Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope depicts IC 1623, an entwined pair of interacting galaxies which lies around 270 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. The two galaxies in IC 1623 are plunging headlong into one another in a process known as a galaxy merger. Their collision has ignited a frenzied spate of star formation known as a starburst, creating new stars at a rate more than twenty times that of the Milky Way galaxy. Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Armus & A. Evans. Acknowledgement: R. Colombari

Here, the Webb Picture of the Month of merging galaxies IC 1623 A and B is juxtaposed with a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In the Webb MIRI image, the bright core, heated gas and dust, and young star-forming regions are all visible. The Hubble and Webb NIRCAM images show the galaxies distorted spiral arms, while MIRI reveals the faint ghostly glow of interstellar dust. Image:ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Armus & A. Evans. Acknowledgement: R. Colombari

A merging galaxy pair cavort in this image captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This pair of galaxies, known to astronomers as II ZW 96, is roughly 500 million light-years from Earth and lies in the constellation Delphinus, close to the celestial equator. As well as the wild swirl of the merging galaxies, a menagerie of background galaxies are dotted throughout the image. The two galaxies are in the process of merging and as a result have a chaotic, disturbed shape. The bright cores of the two galaxies are connected by bright tendrils of star-forming regions, and the spiral arms of the lower galaxy have been twisted out of shape by the gravitational perturbation of the galaxy merger. It is these star-forming regions that made II ZW 96 such a tempting target for Webb; the galaxy pair is particularly bright at infrared wavelengths thanks to the presence of the star formation. Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Armus, A. Evans

This image of the Cartwheel and its companion galaxies is a composite from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which reveals details that are difficult to see in the individual images alone. This galaxy formed as the result of a high-speed collision that occurred about 400 million years ago. The Cartwheel is composed of two rings, a bright inner ring and a colourful outer ring. Both rings expand outward from the centre of the collision like shockwaves. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

At the longer wavelengths of light captured by its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Webb focuses on the area surrounding the central star cluster and unveils a very different view of the Tarantula Nebula. In this light, the young hot stars of the cluster fade in brilliance, and glowing gas and dust come forward. Abundant hydrocarbons light up the surfaces of the dust clouds, shown in blue and purple. Much of the nebula takes on a more ghostly, diffuse appearance because mid-infrared light is able to show more of what is happening deeper inside the clouds. Still-embedded protostars pop into view within their dusty cocoons, including a bright group at the very top edge of the image, left of centre.
Other areas appear dark, like in the lower-right corner of the image. This indicates the densest areas of dust in the nebula, that even mid-infrared wavelengths cannot penetrate. These could be the sites of future, or current, star formation. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

In this mosaic image stretching 340 light-years across, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) displays the Tarantula Nebula star-forming region in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust. The most active region appears to sparkle with massive young stars, appearing pale blue. Scattered among them are still-embedded stars, appearing red, yet to emerge from the dusty cocoon of the nebula. NIRCam is able to detect these dust-enshrouded stars thanks to its unprecedented resolution at near-infrared wavelengths.
To the upper left of the cluster of young stars, and the top of the nebula’s cavity, an older star prominently displays NIRCam’s distinctive eight diffraction spikes, an artifact of the telescope’s structure. Following the top central spike of this star upward, it almost points to a distinctive bubble in the cloud. Young stars still surrounded by dusty material are blowing this bubble, beginning to carve out their own cavity. Astronomers used two of Webb’s spectrographs to take a closer look at this region and determine the chemical makeup of the star and its surrounding gas. This spectral information will tell astronomers about the age of the nebula and how many generations of star birth it has seen. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

This image of the Neptune system, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), reveals stunning views of the planet’s rings, which have not been seen with this clarity in more than three decades. Webb’s new image of Neptune also captures details of the planet’s turbulent, windy atmosphere. To the upper left of the planet in this image, one of Neptune’s moons, Triton, also sports Webb’s distinctive eight diffraction spikes, an artefact of the telescope’s structure. Webb also captured 6 more of Neptune’s 14 known moons, along with a smattering of distant galaxies that appear as dim splotches and a nearby star. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Naomi Rowe-Gurney (NASA-GSFC)