Webb caught overlapping stellar jets tearing through a nebula 3,300 light-years away

Gold on the left, red on the right and a blinding diffraction-spiked star in the middle: that is how NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope rendered NGC 7129, a star-forming region in the constellation Cepheus. The region lies about 3,300 light-years from Earth, and the picture released on October 6, 2026 is crowded with outflows from young stars blasting into the gas around them.

Several of those outflows seem to cross one another. NASA’s Webb team says that is partly an accident of perspective, since multiple jets overlap along Earth’s line of sight and produce a tangled, chaotic look. The release is credited to the Webb mission team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, with media contacts at Goddard and at the Space Telescope Science Institute, whose Alyssa Pagan handled the image processing.

The image was built from near-infrared data collected by Webb’s NIRCam camera on December 17, 2025, under observing proposal 12491, led by M. Garcia Marin. The frame spans about 6 arcminutes, which works out to 5.7 light-years at that distance. Alyssa Pagan of the Space Telescope Science Institute processed it, and the colors are assigned to filters rather than showing what a human eye would see. Gold marks hot atomic hydrogen, red marks cooler molecular hydrogen that protostars have shocked, and the gray areas are the coldest, densest gas, where protostars have not yet formed.

LkHα 234 and the golden cavity

The brightest object in the frame is LkHα 234, a pre-main-sequence star with roughly 5 to 8 times the Sun’s mass, according to NASA’s write-up of the observation. Outflows from an earlier stage of its life carved the golden cavity to its left, a bubble about 3.5 light-years wide. Several smaller pre-main-sequence stars, also embedded in the cavity, sit inside that bubble, and their winds push against the surrounding gas in small bow shocks that show up as curved arcs.

The star has not yet begun to fuse hydrogen in the way a mature star does, and NASA notes that it eventually will. The release gives no age for it, which leaves open how long the earlier outflows took to carve the cavity.

Protostars in the red region

Younger objects crowd the red region to the right of the central star. Those protostars eject superheated outflows that slam into the gas, which heats the molecular hydrogen and gives that part of the picture its rough, glowing texture. One protostar is wrapped in a donut-shaped disk that casts a shadow, a feature NASA compares to Hubble’s “Bat Shadow.”

At the upper left, near a blue nebula, more protostellar outflows appear. The blue there is gray gas lit up by bright protostars at the top of the frame, a reminder that the same stars shaping the region are also what make it visible.

The bow shocks deserve a second look. Each one marks a place where a wind from an embedded star runs into slower gas and piles it up, so the arcs in the cavity trace where individual stars are pushing outward. In the red region, the roughness of the glow comes from the same process on a larger scale, with protostellar outflows shocking the molecular hydrogen and lighting it up. Credit for the image goes to NASA, ESA, the Canadian Space Agency, the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Spitzer’s older view of the same region

NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope looked at NGC 7129 earlier, at lower resolution, and the agency published a side-by-side comparison of the two views. Spitzer’s IRAC camera found many protostars in the dense material but struggled to resolve what they were doing to the gas around them. The Spitzer panel shows mostly red dust and gas, plus a green blob to the right of the central star.

Webb’s image shows the bow shocks, the stars and the protostars inside the golden cavity, along with the effects of outflows in the dense red clouds. Its sensitivity also picks up faint emission from the cold gray gas and a scatter of distant background galaxies. Spitzer’s four infrared channels ran from 3.6 to 8 micrometers, while the Webb composite combines six NIRCam filters, and the image page lists both sets so that anyone comparing the two can match each color to its filter.

More of the telescope’s star-formation work, including a September 15, 2026 image of IC 348, appears on NASA’s Webb news listing, and the Webb mission page notes that the observatory orbits the Sun 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the second Lagrange point.

The NGC 7129 release names no age for LkHα 234 and quotes no scientist, so the open item is quantitative: how fast the individual outflows are moving, and which protostars launched them, are not in what NASA published.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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