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NGC 7129: Webb telescope reveals hidden stars and tangled jets in a stellar nursery 3,300 light-years away

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NGC 7129, a stellar nursery about 3,300 light-years from Earth, is revealed in fresh detail in an image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA featured as its image of the day on 20 October 2026. Webb’s infrared view uncovers many stars that clouds of dust had hidden from earlier telescopes.

NGC 7129: Protostars and stars within the glowing gases of NGC 7129, seen by Webb
Protostars and stars within the glowing gases of NGC 7129, seen by Webb Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI) (public domain).

Why the James Webb Space Telescope can see inside NGC 7129

Stars begin life in molecular clouds, cold and dense regions of dust and gas, and those dusty cocoons make young stars impossible to see for many telescopes, especially those that cannot capture infrared light, NASA said. Webb’s high infrared sensitivity lets astronomers look through the dust and study the start of the stellar life cycle. In the image, hot atomic hydrogen gas appears in a golden region, while cooler molecular hydrogen gas, shocked by embedded protostars, is shown in red. The stars in the cluster are at different stages of development, because more massive stars form and evolve faster. The image was first released on 6 October.

Key Facts

  • Distance: about 3,300 light-years
  • Central star: LkH(alpha) 234, about 5-8 solar masses
  • Golden cavity: about 3.5 light-years across
  • First released: 6 October 2026; NASA image of the day on 20 October
  • Instrument: Webb NIRCam (infrared)

A 3.5 light-year cavity carved by a young star

The most massive and most mature star is the luminous central star LkH(alpha) 234, which shows the image’s most prominent diffraction pattern. It is a pre-main-sequence star of around 5 to 8 times the mass of the Sun that has mostly finished gathering mass and is contracting under gravity, heating up; in time it will fuse hydrogen like the Sun. The golden cavity to its left, about 3.5 light-years across, is the clearest sign of its impact: outflows from an earlier stage of its life carved into the dense cloud of hydrogen. Much of that gas is blown away, but a large amount is compressed, creating conditions for more stars to form. Light from the central and embedded stars also creates a sharp ridge called a photodissociation region, where hydrogen molecules break down into atoms.

Protostars, stellar jets and a shadow like the Bat Shadow

The clumpy red matter to the right of the central star hides much younger objects, protostars. As they gather mass they eject outflows of superheated material, and these jets hit the dense, translucent matter around them, creating shocks that give the scene its textured, chaotic look; many outflows overlap from our point of view. More outflows appear at the upper left near a blue nebula, whose centre hosts a protostar surrounded by a doughnut-shaped disc. That disc casts a shadow on the surrounding nebula, reminiscent of the “Bat Shadow” seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope observed this region before, but Webb’s sharper resolution shows far more detailed gas and dust filaments, along with many background galaxies.

Why It Matters: Watching stars form at different stages in one cloud helps astronomers understand how stars like the Sun, and the planets around them, came to be.

Also on TrendDesh: Eagle Nebula pillars go sonified: NASA APOD turns Hubble and Chandra data into sound · Euclid telescope discovers its first new comet, now named C/2026 S1 (Euclid), says ESA

Source: NASA Image of the Day, 20 Oct 2026 · NASA Webb release

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