Overview

• The newly released image centers on Pismis 24 in the Lobster Nebula about 5,500 light-years away in Scorpius, one of the nearest regions of massive star formation.
• NIRCam resolves thousands of stars in the cluster and reveals tens of thousands more background stars across the Milky Way.
• The cluster’s brightest object, Pismis 24-1, is now known to be at least two very massive stars of roughly 74 and 66 solar masses, though the pair is not individually resolved here.
• Intense radiation and stellar winds from super-hot young stars carve cavities and towering spires in the nebula; the tallest spire spans about 5.4 light-years with a tip roughly 0.14 light-years wide.
• Color mapping links features to physics: cyan traces hot ionized hydrogen, orange marks dust, red shows cooler molecular hydrogen, and black indicates the densest gas.