NASA's James Webb captured a stellar nursery like the one that birthed our Sun

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, about 390 light-years away. The image, released July 12, 2023, showed roughly 50 young stars, several with the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk — the material that eventually forms planets. Giant jets from newborn stars lit up surrounding gas in red, while a single, more massive star named S1 carved a glowing cavity into the dust using its own stellar wind. Despite its chaotic appearance, astronomers describe the region as a relatively quiet stellar nursery. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Pontoppidan (STScI); Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI); N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb)