The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured incredibly sharp images of the Horsehead Nebula, one of the most famous celestial bodies in the sky above Earth.
The most powerful telescope ever placed in orbit around our planet, JWST was able to see details of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, that had never been revealed before, showing some areas in a whole new light.
The new images show the Horsehead Nebula as turbulent waves of gas rising from the western side of Orion B, a star-forming molecular cloud located 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion.
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The Horsehead Nebula is a collapsing cloud of dense, cool gas that is illuminated by a hot young star embedded in the upper left edge. The horse-like structure that makes this nebula so distinctive was formed as lighter gas was eroded away. this left behind a thick column of dense gas and dust that is harder to erode.
But this won’t last forever. Scientists estimate that even this column of denser matter will disappear in about 5 million years.
JWST’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) was able to capture a small part of the Horsehead Nebula up close. This results in it appearing as a curved wall of thick smoky gas and dust with distant stars and galaxies above it. One large and bright star is particularly noticeable, showing prominent diffraction spikes associated with images produced by JWST.
JWST’s other primary camera, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), was also able to capture an amazing image of part of the Horsehead Nebula. A small portion of the nebula fills half of this image with thick white and blue smoke punctuated by dark voids.
The Horsehead Nebula is a photon-dominated region (PDR), a region of space where young massive stars heat interstellar gas and dust. These cool clouds exist among the warmer ionized gas closer to newborn stars. In the PDR, these stars influence the chemistry of this gas and dust by their emission of ultraviolet light. PDRs are found between stars where the gas is dense enough to resist ionization but still not too dense to allow ultraviolet light to pass through.
Studying the light from the PDR allows scientists to study how interstellar matter evolves and the chemical processes that define that evolution.
The fact that the Horsehead Nebula is relatively close to Earth means that it is an ideal PDR for astronomers to use in conducting these investigations, determining the structure of the PDR, and studying the interactions of radiation and chemistry in interstellar space. These images show that JWST is ready to influence this investigation.
The results of JWST’s research into the Horsehead Nebula have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
