10 James Webb space photos reveal cosmic nurseries where stars come to life

At first glance, this may look like a photo of a rocky mountain range beneath a starlit sky. But this is actually the edge of giant cavity inside a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula located 8,500 light years from Earth.

Nicknamed the "Cosmic Cliffs," this cavernous region is shaped by massive, hot young stars inside the cavity's core. These stars emit powerful winds and radiation that, over time, have carved out this area.

Turbulence deep within stellar nurseries creates high-density regions called knots. When these knots become massive enough, the gas and dust collapses in on itself and the material at its core heats up, forming a baby star, or "protostar."

This is a close-up of a protostar forming inside the dark cloud L1527, a star-forming region within a larger stellar nursery called the Taurus molecular cloud about 460 light years from Earth. The protostar is hidden inside the "neck" of this hourglass shape.

This image clearly shows how ejections of wind and radiation from this very young star blow away surrounding gas and dust. The ejections glow orange and blue in this infrared view, giving the appearance of a fiery hourglass.

A look within the Perseus stellar nursery allowed JWST to capture another stunning image of protostellar outflow.

This is an example of a Herbig-Haro object, which forms when wind and gas emitted by newborn stars send shock waves colliding into surrounding gas and dust at high speeds. Molecules get excited by this turbulence and emit infrared light, which is the colorful glow that JWST photographed here.

The protostar is hiding in the black void at the center of these glowing shock waves, shrouded by a dark brown cloud of gas and dust.

Rho Opiuchi is the nearest stellar nursery to Earth, roughly 390 light years away.

It's relatively small and quiet compared to other star-forming regions, but this image showcases dramatic outflows from about 50 young stars as big, or smaller, than our sun, which you can see here as red clouds on the right amid the clouds in the center that glow green and orange from carbon-rich dust, Pontoppidan said.

This mosaic image of the Tarantula Nebula stretches 340 light-years across. JWST shows this stellar nursery in a totally new light, revealing thousands of never-before-seen young stars nestled in the center.

The Tarantula Nebula is particularly interesting to astronomers because its chemical composition is similar to the massive star-forming regions observed at the universe's "cosmic noon," when star formation was at its peak.

This region of the Orion Nebula is known as the Orion Bar. In this ridge-like region, ultraviolet light from the Trapezium cluster (a group of massive young stars in the upper-left corner of the image) erodes the surrounding molecular cloud.

Scientists are interested in observing this region of the Orion Nebula because it appears to resemble what our solar system may have looked like while it was still forming, Pontoppidan said.

One of the building blocks of life is hiding in this image: water ice.

This is the center of the icy Chameleon I dark molecular cloud. Radiation from Ced 110 IRS 4, a young protostar glowing orange in the image's upper left, illuminates the misty blue cloud material around it.

In the background, light from more stars (orange dots behind the cloud) shines through. By studying this light, astronomers detected particles of water ice within the clouds, which may, one day, go on to form exoplanets with the conditions for life.

Nebula N79 is a huge star factory. It's considered a younger version of the Tarantula Nebula, but it's nearly five times larger, spanning 1,630 light-years across. And when it comes to birthing stars, N79 is twice as efficient.

In this image, a bright young star shines through the nebula, showcasing its six starburst spikes.

The NGC 604 stellar nursery is an emission nebula: a cloud of ionized gas that emits its own light at various wavelengths. In this image, tendrils and clumps of emission appear in bright red, extending out from open "bubbles" in the cloud.

These bubbles were carved out by stellar winds from extremely hot, bright young stars within. In fact, NGC 604 holds more than 200 of the hottest, most massive kinds of stars in the universe, all still in their infancy. One example is O-type stars, which can be more than 100 times more massive than our sun.

In this way, NGC 604 is truly unique. There's no other star-forming region like it in the whole Milky Way.

These are the Pillars of Creation, named for the long, vertical clouds of gas and dust that resemble the geologic arches and spires of a desert landscape. Photographed at this angle, they almost look like a human hand reaching out into the cosmos.

The pillars themselves are about five light-years tall. Inside them, knots of gas and dust collapse in on themselves to form new stars. Bright red, wavy lines at the edges of the pillars are ejections from newly forming stars.