NASA’s Webb Telescope captures sharpest ever images of Horsehead Nebula

Anna Ashcraft
·2 min read

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — NASA has released the newest and best images to date from the James Webb Space Telescope of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies — the Horsehead Nebula.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released images Monday morning in what the agency calls the sharpest infrared images to date of a zoomed-in portion of the iconic nebula that is located in the constellation Orion.

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The Horsehead Nebula is famously known for looking like a horse’s head.

NASA says these new images show the top of the “horse’s mane,” or edge of the nebula, in a whole new light, capturing its complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution.

The Horsehead Nebula, imaged by the NIRCam instrument on NASA’s Webb Telescope, features a portion of the horse’s “mane” about 0.8 light-years wide. The blue clouds at the bottom of the image are dominated by cold, molecular hydrogen. Red wisps above the nebula represent mainly atomic hydrogen gas. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS)

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is around 1,300 light-years away in the western side of a dense region known as the Orion B molecular cloud, according to NASA. It formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and is illuminated by a nearby hot star.

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A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space — some come from a supernova, others are regions where new stars are beginning to form.

Webb’s new images focus on the illuminated edge of the top of the nebula’s distinctive dust and gas structure.

The “mane” of the Horsehead Nebula is shown here imaged by Webb’s MIRI instrument. The mid-infrared light captured by MIRI reveals substances like dusty silicates and soot-like molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS)
The “mane” of the Horsehead Nebula is shown here imaged by Webb’s MIRI instrument. The mid-infrared light captured by MIRI reveals substances like dusty silicates and soot-like molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS)

Because of Webb’s MIRI and NIRCam instruments, an international team of astronomers was able to reveal for the first time the small-scale structures of the illuminated edge of the Horsehead Nebula.

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The new images have also allowed astronomers to study how the dust from the nebula blocks and emits light, along with studying the spectroscopic data to learn more about the evolution of the physical and chemical properties of the material observed across the nebula.

The findings were published Monday in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The “mane” of the Horsehead Nebula is shown here imaged by Webb’s MIRI instrument. The mid-infrared light captured by MIRI reveals substances like dusty silicates and soot-like molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI), ESA/Webb, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona), M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Astronomers say the Horsehead Nebula is considered one of the best regions in the sky to study how radiation interacts with interstellar matter, however it is estimated that the nebula will disintegrate in about 5 million years.

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The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Dec. 25, 2021, and studies every phase in the history of our Universe — the first glows after the Big Bang, the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, and the evolution of our own Solar System.

Webb orbits the Sun unlike its predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope which orbits the Earth.

Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

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