From BBC
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The new super space telescope James Webb has ventured into the freezer.
It’s been probing some of the darkest, coldest regions in space for clues about the chemistry that goes into making planets, and perhaps even life.
This newly released image shows a segment of the Chameleon I molecular cloud, some 630 light years from Earth.
It’s here, at temperatures down to about -260C, that Webb is detecting types of ice grains not previously observed.
Eventually, such clouds will collapse to form stars and, around them, planets. And the chemistry being spied by Webb will be incorporated.
You can see this in action at top-left of the image.
The orange “hourglass” feature is a protostar – a star in the mode of formation, pulling material from the cloud on to itself.
The orange stars underneath are more mature and bright enough that they generate the distinctive six spikes that have now become familiar in Webb pictures and are artefacts of the telescope’s segmented mirror design.
But to detect the ices, Webb is ignoring all of these stars to the side and looking to stars behind the blue wispy Chameleon I.
As the light from these objects shines through the cloud, some of it is absorbed by the ices to betray their composition.
“It’s sort of like a shadow puppet,” explained
