Serpens Nebula North – aligned outflows crop (NIRCam image)

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the Serpens Nebula, where astronomers have discovered a grouping of aligned protostellar outflows. These jets are signified by bright clumpy streaks that appear red, which are shock waves from the jet hitting surrounding gas and dust. Here, the red colour represents the presence of molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Typically these objects have a variety of orientations within one region. Here, however, they are all slanted in the same direction, to the same degree, like sleet pouring down during a storm. Researchers say the discovery of these aligned objects, made possible only by Webb’s exquisite spatial resolution and sensitivity at near-infrared wavelengths, is providing information about the fundamentals of how stars are born.

[Image description: A portion of the young star-forming region known as the Serpens Nebula. It’s filled with wispy orange and red layers of gas and dust and within that orange dust are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. There are wispy blue filaments of gas in the bottom right corner of the image. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field; the brightest sources in the field have the eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the James Webb Space Telescope.]