Overview

• NASA, ESA and CSA’s James Webb Space Telescope imaged a twin jet spanning about 8 light‑years in the Sharpless 2‑284 proto‑cluster roughly 15,000 light‑years from Earth.
• The outflow’s filamentary knots, bow shocks and linear chains in infrared light show the jet plowing through interstellar gas and dust at very high speeds.
• Modeling tied to the Webb data indicates the driving protostar is about 10 times the Sun’s mass and is still accreting.
• The detection supports the idea that jet size scales with stellar mass and the nearly opposite lobes suggest a long‑lived, stable disk consistent with core‑accretion formation.
• The analysis, accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, combines Webb imaging with ALMA results that also identify another dense core for follow‑up studies.