Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged an extremely large and symmetric protostellar jet at the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy in the forming cluster Sh2-284. From tip to tip, this protostellar jet is 8 light-years across, about double the distance from our Sun to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.

Its detection provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent star—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet—and thus for a universal mechanism for star formation from low to high masses.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-observes-immense-stellar-jet-on-outskirts-of-our-milky-way/

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image Use Policy: http://stsci.edu/copyright/