Almost Fantasy: The James Webb Telescope’s Stunning New Image of Space

The image reveals gigantic pillars of molecular gas near the Pismis 24 cluster, explaining how new stars are formed.

It’s a scene that could grace the cover of a fantasy novel: brilliant stars glittering above misty mountain peaks. In reality, you are looking at a real part of the universe—an image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA has shared this view of towering peaks rising from a vast nebula approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth.

This nebula is called NGC 6357, or the Lobster Nebula, in the constellation Scorpius. It is essentially a huge cloud of mostly molecular hydrogen—a giant “stellar nursery” where new stars are born. At the center of the nebula is the star cluster Pismis 24, home to hot, young, and massive stars. Their ultraviolet radiation disperses the surrounding gas, ionizing it and creating a large cavity within the nebula.

The image, taken in the near-infrared range, shows only a small part of the nebula—the inner edge of this cavity. These “spires” are enormous: the largest one in the frame stretches 5.4 light-years from its tip to its base, and the tip itself is 0.14 light-years wide. Our solar system out to Neptune (about 4.5 billion kilometers) could fit inside such a tip at least 200 times over.

The brightest stars in the image, with their “diffraction spikes,” are the most massive. One of them, Pismis 24-1, was once thought to be the most massive star known, with an estimated mass of about 300 solar masses.

Later, it was discovered that Pismis 24-1 is not a single star, but three. One has a mass of about 66 solar masses. The other two form a spectroscopic binary, meaning they are too close to each other to be resolved individually, but their presence is revealed by the color shift caused by their orbital motion. Each of the two components of the binary is estimated to have a mass of about 36 solar masses.

All three of these stars are so massive that they will end their lives in supernova explosions in about a million years.

The largest pillar of molecular gas in the image appears to be pointing toward Pismis 24-1. The gas around it is being eroded by the stars’ ultraviolet radiation, but the pillar itself is denser and resists. This doesn’t mean it remains unchanged: the gas within the pillar is stirred up and compressed to the point that it begins to succumb to its own gravity and collapse, leading to the formation of new stars. In the future, these new young stars will destroy the pillar from within and emerge from their gaseous cocoon.

Thousands of stars are visible in the image: a few hundred belong to the Pismis 24 cluster, while the rest are much farther away, beyond NGC 6357.

It’s important to remember that the image uses false colors—Webb registers infrared radiation, which is invisible to the human eye. In the photo, a star’s color represents its type: its temperature and mass, how much dust surrounds it, and how much its light is absorbed.

The nebula is also depicted in assigned colors: turquoise indicates hot, ionized gas that scatters light from the nearest hot stars; orange represents micron-sized dust particles; and red corresponds to cooler, denser molecular hydrogen where star formation is still possible. The densest regions of molecular gas are colored almost black—they are opaque and do not emit visible light.

The final touch to the scene is a whitish mist that seems to evaporate from the sharp “peaks” of the gas mountains. This is gas and dust flowing off the pillars under the influence of stellar radiation, with the stream of gas scattering the starlight.