fre. dec 12th, 2025

Stellar Jet

dec 11, 2025

Gaseous yellow-orange filaments look like a flower seen from the side and tilted slightly from upper left to lower right, slightly higher than the center of the frame. Extending from the flower to upper left and lower right are red gas outflows that have an overall shape of tall, narrow triangles with rounded tips. Each red triangle is made up of wavy, irregular lines. Dozens of stars are scattered across the field. One particularly bright white star with eight diffraction spikes is located at the top of the yellow rose. Another bright blue star with even more prominent diffraction spikes is to its lower left. The background of space is black.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star in this image released on Sept. 10, 2025. Stellar jets, which are powered by the gravitational energy released as a star grows in mass, encode the formation history of the protostar. This image provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)