Last week marked the first anniversary of when the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope started beaming images back to Earth. And to celebrate, NASA has released a spectacular image of one of the most photographed parts of the sky.
It's the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, which is the nearest star-forming region in space to us, being just 400 light-years away. What Webb shows us is only a tiny part of this dense region of gas and dust, which is what you'd expect, given the telescope's astonishing resolution.
To give you a sense of the awesome scale in the photo, the entire image is about half a light-year across, or 2.9 trillion miles (4.7 trillion km).
The eye is immediately drawn to the white nebula at centre-left where a relatively young - a few million years old - star is lighting up everything around it.
But look below at the red, bar-like feature that stretches across the entire image. This is an outflow of material from a protostar. Very young stars like this one - their age measured in mere thousands of years - will pull hydrogen gas and dust on to themselves as they grow. But the dynamics involved mean some of this material will also get ejected outwards to crash into, and light up, the nearby environment.
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