'Cosmic tornado' swirls in breathtaking new James Webb Space Telescope image

A cosmic coincidence has led to one of the most amazing images ever captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The dramatic outflow from a newborn star, known as Herbig-Haro 49/50 (HH 49/50), just so happened to align perfectly with a distant spiral galaxy, creating this mesmerizing celestial scene.

Herbig-Haro objects are glowing clouds of gas and dust shaped by newborn stars or protostars. They form when jets of charged particles, ejected from young stars at immense speeds, slam into surrounding material, creating brilliant, ever-changing patterns in the sky.

Nestled within the Chamaeleon I Cloud complex — one of the closest stellar nurseries to Earth — Herbig-Haro 49/50 offers a glimpse into the chaotic beauty of star formation. This vast cloud of gas and dust is teeming with newborn, sun-like stars, likely resembling the environment that produced our own solar system.

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First observed in 2006 by NASA's now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, past observations revealed that the HH 49/50 outflow is racing away from Earth at astonishing speeds of 100 to 300 kilometers per second (60 to 190 miles per second).

Scientists have suspected that the source of the Herbig-Haro 49/50 outflow is a protostar known as Cederblad 110 IRS4 (CED 110 IRS4), which is located roughly 1.5 light-years away from the object.

By cosmic standards, CED 110 IRS4 is quite young — just tens of thousands to a million years old — and is still growing, pulling in material from its surrounding disk. As part of this process, some of the gas gets funneled along the protostar's magnetic field lines and shot out as high-speed jets. These jets slam into surrounding clouds of gas and dust, creating Herbig-Haro objects, which are glowing shock waves marking where the outflow collides with its surroundings.

HH 49/50 is one of these impact sites. It was nicknamed the "Cosmic Tornado" due to its dramatic, swirling shape. Spitzer's images weren't clear enough to discern the fuzzy object located at its tip — but JWST's are.

Using Webb's NIRCam and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), astronomers have captured glowing hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules (shown in orange and red in the image), which are being heated and energized by the powerful jets from the nearby newborn star. These molecules, along with energized grains of dust, illuminate the intricate and dynamic processes shaping the star's surroundings.

Webb's detailed images of HH 49/50 reveal arcs of glowing gas that helped astronomers trace the path of the jet back to its source — CED 110IRS4. However, not all arcs align perfectly with the same direction.

One particularly odd feature — an outcrop near the top of the main outflow — doesn't seem to fit. Scientists think it might be a second, unrelated outflow that happens to overlap in the image. Another possibility is that the main outflow is breaking apart, creating this strange shape. The irregular patterns may also be caused by the slow, wobbly motion of the protostar's jet over time, a phenomenon known as precession.

"Webb has captured these two unassociated objects in a lucky alignment," the Webb team wrote in a statement today (March 24), when the new imagery was released. "Over thousands of years, the edge of HH 49/50 will move outwards and eventually appear to cover up the distant galaxy."