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Rho Ophiuchi Video Tour

This video tours a portion of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. The image was taken to celebrate the first anniversary of the start of science operations for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems. Once our entire solar system, encompassing the entire history of life as we know it, would have appeared something like this if seen from a distance.

At bottom, a glowing cave of dust dominates the image. It was carved out by the star S1, at the center of the cavity – the only star in the image that is significantly more massive than our Sun.

  • Release Date
    July 12, 2023
  • Science Release
    Webb Celebrates First Year of Science With Close-up on Birth of Sun-like Stars
    Read the release
  • Credit
    Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, Gregory Bacon (STScI)

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Related Images & Videos

Red dual opposing jets coming from young stars fill the darker top half of the image, while a glowing pale-yellow, cave-like structure is bottom center, tilted toward two o’clock, with a bright star at its center. The dust of the cave structure becomes wispy toward eight o’clock. Above the arched top of the dust cave three groupings of stars with diffraction spikes are arranged. A dark cloud sits at the top of the arch of the glowing dust cave, with one streamer curling down the right-hand side. The dark shadow of the cloud appears pinched in the center, with light emerging in a triangle shape above and below the pinch, revealing the presence of a star inside the dark cloud. The image’s largest jets of red material emanate from within this dark cloud, thick and displaying structure like the rough face of a cliff, glowing brighter at the edges. At the top center of the image, a star displays another, larger pinched dark shadow, this time vertically. To the left of this star is a more wispy, indistinct region.

Rho Ophiuchi (NIRCam Image)

The first anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small,...

Black header across the top of the image with text reading James Webb Space Telescope, Rho Ophiuchi. At the bottom left are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The north arrow points in the 9 o’clock direction. The east arrow points toward 6 o’clock. At the lower right is a scale bar labeled 0.1 light-years. The length of the scale bar is one-seventh the total width of the image. Below the image is a color key showing which NIRCam filters were used to create the image and which visible-light color is assigned to each filter. From left to right, filter F187N is dark blue; F200W is pale blue; F335W is blue-green; F444W is yellow; F470N is red.

Rho Ophiuchi (NIRCam Compass Image)

Image of star formation in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference. The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from...

Telescope image including distant stars and the dark, dusty arm of a galaxy are overlaid with semi-transparent graphics representing the constellations Scorpius, as a scorpion bug, on the right and Ophiuchus, showing a man's legs to the upper left. Thin blue lines connect the actual stars of the constellations.

Zoom in to Rho Ophiuchi

Travel to the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. The journey begins with a ground-based image by astrophotographer Akira Fujii, then transitions into a plate from the Digitized Sky Survey. Next a two-color image from the now-retired infrared NASA Spitzer Space Telescope appears, and...

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Details

Last Updated
Aug 28, 2025
Contact
Media

Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov

Video Credit

NASA, ESA, CSA, Gregory Bacon (STScI)

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