JWST's observations of NGC 628, a face-on spiral galaxy, combine near- and mid-infrared light, and accentuate the glowing lanes and clouds of dust lying within its spiral arms. #

The Horsehead Nebula, imaged by the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, featuring a portion of the "horse's mane" about 0.8 light-years wide. The ethereal clouds that appear blue at the bottom of the image are dominated by cold, molecular hydrogen. Red-colored wisps extending above the main nebula represent mainly atomic hydrogen gas. In this area, known as a photodissociation region, ultraviolet light from nearby young, massive stars creates a mostly neutral, warm area of gas and dust between the fully ionized gas above and the colder nebula below. As with many Webb images, distant galaxies are sprinkled in the background. #

This image from the JWST shows a spectacular bright view of the north pole, rings, and 14 of the 27 moons of the planet Uranus. Many of the light sources in the backdrop are much more distant galaxies. The reflected sunlight from Uranus took about two and a half hours to reach the Earth, compared with the millions or billions of years light has traveled from these background galaxies. #

JWST gazed at the Crab Nebula in the search for answers about the supernova remnant’s origins. Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) have revealed new details in infrared light. Similar to the Hubble optical wavelength image released in 2005, in Webb images the remnant appears to comprise a crisp, cagelike structure of fluffy red-orange filaments of gas that trace doubly ionized sulfur. Among the remnant’s interior, yellow-white and green fluffy ridges form large-scale looping structures, which represent areas where dust particles reside. #

This image shows the irregular galaxy NGC 6822, as observed by the NIRCam mounted on JWST, revealing the galaxy’s countless stars in incredible detail. Here, the dust and gas that pervade the galaxy are reduced to translucent red wisps, laying the stars bare for astronomical study. #

JWST captured this image of a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. Look for them at the center of the red diffraction spikes. The stars are buried deeply, appearing as an orange-white splotch. They are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that continues to add to their mass. HH 46/47 is an important object to study because it is relatively young—only a few thousand years old. Stars take millions of years to fully form. Targets like this also give researchers insight into how stars gather mass over time, potentially allowing them to model how our own sun, a low-mass star, formed. The two-sided orange lobes were created by earlier ejections from these stars. #

This view of galaxy cluster MACS 0416 was created by combining infrared observations from JWST with visible-light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This cluster magnifies the light from more distant background galaxies through gravitational lensing. As a result, the research team has been able to identify magnified supernovae and even very highly magnified individual stars. #

The distorted spiral galaxy at center, the Penguin, and the compact elliptical galaxy at left, the Egg, are locked in an active embrace. A new near- and mid-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope was taken to mark its second year of science. The pair, known jointly as Arp 142, made its first pass between 25 and 75 million years ago—causing “fireworks,” or new star formation, in the Penguin. #

This European Space Agency/Webb image features the gravitational lensing of the quasar known as RX J1131-1231, located roughly 6 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater. It is considered one of the best lensed quasars discovered to date, as the foreground galaxy smears the image of the background quasar into a bright arc and creates four images of the object. Gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, offers a rare opportunity to study regions close to the black hole in distant quasars, by acting as a natural telescope and magnifying the light from these sources. #

The Serpens Nebula, located 1,300 light-years from Earth, is home to a particularly dense cluster of newly forming stars (about 100,000 years old), some of which will eventually grow to the mass of our sun. #

The vast galaxy cluster SDSS J1226+2152 in the constellation Coma Berenices distorts the images of distant background galaxies into streaks and smears of light in this image from JWST. One of the most notable lensed galaxies in this rich field is named SGAS J12265.3+215220. In this image, it's the innermost lensed galaxy, just above and to the left of the central galaxy. This lies far beyond the foreground cluster in distance, giving us a view into the galaxy roughly 2 billion years after the Big Bang. #

This full view by JWST's NIRCam instrument reveals a 50-light-year-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense center. Hundreds of thousands of stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C region, along with some as-yet-unidentified features. A vast region of ionized hydrogen, shown in cyan, wraps around an infrared-dark cloud, which is so dense that it blocks the light from distant stars behind it. Researchers note the surprising extent of the ionized region, covering about 25 light-years. #

JWST recently captured a spectacular view of the galaxy I Zwicky 18 (I Zw 18). The galaxy was first identified by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s and resides roughly 59 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy is typical of those that inhabited the early universe and it is classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy (much smaller than our Milky Way). Two major starburst regions are embedded in the heart of the galaxy. The wispy brown filaments surrounding the central starburst region are bubbles of gas that have been heated by stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation unleashed by hot, young stars. #

This JWST image of a massive galaxy cluster called WHL0137-08 contains the most strongly magnified galaxy known in the universe’s first billion years: the Sunrise Arc, and within that galaxy, the most distant star ever detected. The star, nicknamed Earendel, was first discovered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Follow-up observations using Webb’s NIRCam reveals the star to be a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as our sun, and about a million times more luminous. Here, the Sunrise Arc appears just below the diffraction spike at the 5-o’clock position. The fuzzier, white galaxies at the center of the image are part of the galaxy cluster bound together by gravity. The various redder, curved galaxies are background galaxies picked up by Webb’s sensitive mirror. #

This JWST image unveils intricate, newly discovered details of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), and shows the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded. The most noticeable colors are clumps of bright orange and light pink that make up the inner shell of the supernova remnant. These tiny knots of gas, comprising sulfur, oxygen, argon, and neon from the star itself, are detectable only by NIRCam’s exquisite resolution, and give researchers a hint at how the dying star shattered like glass when it exploded. The outskirts of the main inner shell look like smoke from a campfire. This marks where ejected material from the exploded star is ramming into surrounding circumstellar material. #

This JWST image shows an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized. N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1,630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. This particular image centers on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes, dubbed N79 South. The distinct “starburst” pattern surrounding this bright object is a series of diffraction spikes. #