The Horsehead Nebula is not only one of the most photogenic objects in the Universe, but also a source of valuable data on the physical and chemical processes in interstellar environments of gas and dust. A team of astronomers used the James Webb Telescope to study the structure of this object and, for the first time, imaged the nebula's border regions in unprecedented detail.
The Horsehead Nebula is located 1,500 light years from Earth. This is a fairly dense clot of dust and gas that resulted from the collapse of a cloud in this region of space. This cloud is illuminated by ultraviolet light from a nearby young and hot star, whose light also changes the chemical composition of the gas and disperses it and dust. Ultimately, the nebula will also disappear over time under the pressure of radiation from stars, but for the Horsehead this will happen in about 5 million years.
Using Webb's infrared instruments, scientists for the first time obtained an image of the "mane" of the Horsehead - a border region of space 0.8 light years long. The researchers were interested in the behavior of dust and gas in the dispersion region, where these processes are most clearly visible.
Thanks to new observations, it was possible to better imagine the volumetric picture of the distribution of dust and gas in the nebula in the scattering region and to see how the substance is carried away in thin streams into empty space. The spectral data obtained by Webb will be analyzed later. Ultraviolet, in the process of photodissociation, changes the chemical and physical composition of the gas-dust environment of the nebula, and this is the key to understanding the evolution of matter in the Universe. Such knowledge does not lie on the road, and Webb has become an indispensable tool on the path to obtaining it.