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Looks like the giant space cat has stepped in something. 🐾

This image of the Cat’s Paw Nebula includes infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope and X-rays from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (in pinkish purple). A mottled patch of pink at the center reveals young, million-year-old stars tucked behind thick, overlapping rings of dark orange cosmic dust.

Webb’s view reveals a chaotic scene still in development: Massive young stars are carving away at nearby gas and dust, while their bright starlight is producing a bright nebulous glow represented in blue.

Orion's Treasures over Snowy Mountains

Image Credit & Copyright: Włodzimierz Bubak; Text: Ogetay Kayali (MTU)

Explanation: Rising over a frozen valley in the Tatra Mountains, the familiar stars and nebulas of Orion dominate this wide-field nightscape. The featured deep photo was taken in southern Poland's highest mountain range last month, where dark skies and alpine terrain combined to reveal both Earth's rugged beauty and the structure of our galaxy. Above the snowy mountains, Orion's bright belt stars anchor a region of glowing interstellar clouds. The Great Orion Nebula, a vast stellar nursery visible even to the unaided eye, shines near the center of the scene. Surrounding it is the enormous arc of Barnard's Loop, a faint shell of ionized hydrogen gas spanning much of the constellation. To the left, the round Rosette Nebula glows softly, while the grayish Witch Head Nebula hovers to the right, illuminated by nearby starlight. Near the top, the orange supergiant Betelgeuse marks the hunter's shoulder.

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

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Cosmic Twin Trouble: Webb Unmasks a Double-Jet Surprise in HH 797

What looked like one rebellious baby star blasting a single powerful outflow into space has just been revealed as a hidden pair of stellar twins—each launching its own dramatic jet.

Meet Herbig-Haro 797 (HH 797), a glowing streak of shocked gas and dust captured in stunning detail by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Located near the young star cluster IC 348 on the edge of the Perseus dark cloud complex, this object was long thought to be the work of a solitary protostar. Earlier observations even suggested its outflow was spinning, based on curious velocity asymmetries in the gas.

But Webb’s sharp infrared vision has rewritten the story. What appeared as one continuous jet is actually two nearly parallel outflows, each carving its own chain of glowing shocks through the surrounding material. The true culprits? A binary pair of newborn stars, still deeply embedded in a dark cocoon of gas and dust (visible as a small shadowy gap in the image). Hidden from optical telescopes, these twin protostars are each feeding on surrounding material and periodically spitting out high-speed jets in opposite directions—creating the brilliant, filamentary spectacle we see.

Herbig-Haro objects like this are fleeting cosmic light shows: when supersonic jets from forming stars slam into nearby clouds at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour, they heat the gas and make it glow in infrared light—perfect for Webb’s NIRCam to capture. In the upper reaches of the same view, still more baby stars are stirring, adding extra fireworks to this bustling stellar nursery.

A classic case of “everything is not as it seems,” HH 797 reminds us that the universe loves a good plot twist—especially when two stars decide to share the stage.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)