James Webb telescope shares one of its biggest images ever, with record-breaking stars hiding in the dust — Space photo of the week

Behold: one of the largest panoramas from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released to date. This busy and breathtaking image offers a remarkably detailed view of IC 348, a nearby stellar nursery where astronomers are investigating some of the smallest objects produced by star formation.

IC 348 is one of the closest stellar nurseries to Earth and appears in this near-infrared image as an intricate landscape of stars, glowing material and sweeping clouds of gas and dust.

Across the scene, young stars punctuate the dark and luminous clouds. The concentration is greatest around the center, where bright stars show JWST’s distinctive diffraction spikes — a result of the telescope’s optical structure. In the upper-right of the image, still-forming protostars launch streams of material.

And lurking all around this colorful nursery are strange objects that challenge the very definition of a star.

Stars come in all shapes and sizes, from massive stars that explode as supernovas after only a few million years to the smallest and most common stars, red dwarfs, which last for many billions of years. However, there is also a class of substellar objects called brown dwarfs — objects halfway between giant gas planets, like Jupiter, and stars.

In the hunt for tiny brown dwarfs in IC 348, researchers used Webb’s NIRCam instrument in 2024 to survey part of IC 348 and found 39 brown dwarf candidates. The following year, Webb’s NIRSpec instrument studied the light of 15 of them. Nine were identified as new substellar members of the cluster, with the faintest estimated to have masses of around two Jupiters — the least massive brown dwarfs ever found.

How small the smallest brown dwarf can be is an open question in astrophysics. They form as molecular clouds of dust and gas collapse under their own gravity, much like regular stars do. However, unlike stars, brown dwarf cores never become hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium. The brown dwarfs — or “failed stars,” as they’re sometimes called — in this JWST image will help researchers constrain the limits of how tiny these strange objects can get.

The upper-right portion of the panorama provides a dramatic look at another stage of star formation. Protostars hidden within the dusty environment fire jets into nearby gas and dust, producing luminous, eye-catching jets and streams known as Herbig-Haro objects. These gargantuan jets can stretch trillions of miles into space; just one tiny detail in one of JWST’s biggest images yet.

But if that tremendous view still isn’t enough for you, IC 348 was also recently snapped by NASA’s Chandra Observatory, which captured the stellar nursery and other cosmic objects shining purple in brilliant X-ray light.