Overview

• NASA, ESA, and CSA released a James Webb NIRCam image of the young Pismis 24 cluster in the Lobster Nebula about 5,500 light-years away in Scorpius.
• The image resolves thousands of cluster stars and also shows tens of thousands of background Milky Way stars through intervening dust.
• Radiation and winds from super-hot infant stars carve cavities and compress spires where new stars are forming, with the tallest pillar spanning roughly 5.4 light-years.
• Pismis 24-1, once thought to be a single record-setter, is identified as at least two extremely massive stars of about 74 and 66 solar masses that are not individually resolved here.
• False-color mapping ties cyan to ionized hydrogen, orange to dust, red to cooler molecular hydrogen, black to the densest non-emitting gas, and wispy white features to scattered starlight.