The James Webb space telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images yet of the Horsehead Nebula, one of the most distinctive objects in the heavens.
The pictures show an area of space that is part of the constellation of Orion. Rising from the much larger Orion molecular cloud complex is the Horsehead Nebula, an equine-shaped cloud of reddish-brown dust and gas. A nursery for new stars, it lies about 1,300 light years away from Earth.
The nebula formed from a collapsing cloud of interstellar material. It glows because it is illuminated by a nearby hot star.
The gas clouds surrounding the horsehead have already dispersed, evaporated by UV radiation from the nearby star. However, the pillar that forms the horsehead is made of denser clumps of material that are harder to scatter.
Even so, astronomers estimate that the horsehead has about 5 million years left before it also disintegrates.
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• James Webb space telescope captures stellar nursery 390 light years away
The new images show the top of the “horse’s mane”, the edge of the nebula where particles of the dust cloud are being swept into space. The complexity of this region has been captured with unprecedented spatial resolution by Webb’s MIRI and NIRCam instruments, according to Nasa and the European Space Agency.
The nebula was discovered by Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming in 1888.
The Webb telescope is the largest and most powerful observatory to be launched into space. It can detect thousands of galaxies in an area of sky that when viewed from Earth is about the size of a grain of sand.
