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Immense Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 

This video shows the relative size of two different protostellar jets imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The first image shown is an extremely large protostellar jet located in Sh2-284, 15,000 light-years away from Earth. The outflows from the massive central protostar, which weighs 10 times our Sun, span about 8 light-years across. In comparison, a jet imaged by Webb in the nearby low-mass star-forming region of Rho Ophiuchi is just one light-year long.

  • Release Date
    September 10, 2025
  • Science Release
    NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way
    Read the release
  • Credit
    Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Animation: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

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Related Images & Videos

Gaseous yellow-orange filaments look like a rose seen from the side and tilted slightly from upper left to lower right, slightly higher than the center of the frame. Extending from the rose to upper left and lower right are gaseous outflows that appear as red lobes that have an overall shape of tall, narrow triangles with rounded tips. Each red triangle is made up of wavy, irregular lines. Dozens of stars are scattered across the field. One particularly bright white star with eight diffraction spikes is located at the top of the yellow rose. Another bright blue star with even more prominent diffraction spikes is to its lower left. The background of space is black.

Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)

Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.

Image titled u201cJames Webb Space Telescope; Stellar Jet; SH2-284,u201d with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key. Gaseous yellow-orange filaments look like a rose seen from the side and tilted slightly from upper left to lower right, slightly higher than the center of the frame. Extending from the rose to upper left and lower right are gaseous outflows that appear as red lobes that have an overall shape of tall, narrow triangles with rounded tips. At the bottom left are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The east arrow points toward 10 ou2019clock. The north arrow points in the 2 ou2019clock direction. At the bottom left is a scale bar labeled 1.1 light-years, 15 arcsec. The length of the scale bar is about one sixth of the total 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: F162M and 182M are blue, F200W and F356W are green, and F405N and F470N are red.

Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Compass Image)

This image of the stellar jet in Sh2-284, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.

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Details

Last Updated
Sep 10, 2025
Location
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Contact
Media

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

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