Overview
- NASA, ESA, and CSA released a near-infrared NIRCam image of a small region of the Helix Nebula, resolving thousands of comet-like knots and shock fronts.
- Fast, hot outflows from the dying star plow into slower, colder gas and dust shed earlier, sculpting pillars with bright heads and streaming tails.
- Color encodes conditions across the scene, with blue marking the hottest ionized gas, yellow tracing molecular hydrogen, and red highlighting the coolest dust-forming material.
- The central white dwarf that powers the display lies just outside Webb’s frame, and the nebula sits roughly 650 light-years away in Aquarius as one of the nearest planetary nebulae.
- Webb’s zoom complements Hubble, Spitzer, and VISTA views by providing the clearest infrared look yet and pinpointing shielded pockets where complex molecules may form, with deeper analyses expected in follow-up studies.