quote:

Amid an enormous cloud of dust and gas, thousands of stars are forming. Many of these stars have never been seen before, but these images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are revealing them for the first time.

These pictures show the Tarantula Nebula, located about 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud – a galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. The nebula is the biggest and brightest one in all the nearby galaxies, and hosts some of the hottest and most massive stars astronomers have ever seen.

The massive young stars that form a sparkling blue cluster near the centre of the above image have cleared out the gas around them with their powerful radiation and intense stellar winds, revealing pillars of relatively dense gas inside which more young stars are forming. The above image was taken with JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), showing the dusty filaments that make up the web of the Tarantula Nebula.