The James Webb Space Telescope is, in many ways, a time machine. It uses infrared vision to peer back over 13.5 billion years to the earliest moments of our universe.
But even now, the cosmos is expanding and evolving, giving birth to new stars, planets, and new possibilities for the emergence of life.
Stellar nurseries, where new stars bloom to life, are thick clouds of gas and dust, a.k.a. molecular clouds. JWST can see through the clouds to observe star formation in real-time, offering the unique chance to understand how new solar systems form and, ultimately, what makes our existence even possible.
"We can actually go into the nurseries and look at the babies instead of looking at this old, ancient, archaeological evidence from our own solar system," said Klaus Pontoppidan, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and former JWST project scientist.
JWST's observations of stellar nurseries across the galaxy have inspired a slew of scientific discoveries. But they're also profoundly beautiful to look at.