The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured an image of a luminous cloud of material surrounding a newborn star, known as a Herbig-Haro object. These objects are formed when stellar winds and jets of gas from young stars create shockwaves as they collide with the gas and dust from which the star was born. The specific Herbig-Haro object in this image is designated HH 797 and is located about 1,000 light-years away near the young open star cluster IC 348, within the Perseus dark cloud complex.
Infrared instruments like NIRCam on the JWST are ideal for studying young stars and Herbig-Haro objects because they can penetrate the gas and dust that surrounds them. This allows astronomers to observe heated molecules and determine the structures of outflows from these infant stars. The observations also revealed redshifted and blueshifted gas in HH 797, indicating different motion directions of the gas relative to Earth.