James Webb captures gorgeous image of a Cosmic Tornado

By Georgina Torbet Published March 24, 2025

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured another stunning image of space, this time showing the dramatic scenes around a baby star. Very young stars can throw off powerful jets of hot gas as they form, and when these jets collide with nearby dust and gas they form striking structures called Herbig-Haro objects.

This new image shows Herbig-Haro 49/50, located nearby to Earth at just 630 light-years away in the constellation Chamaeleon. Scientists have observed this object before, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, and they named the object the “Cosmic Tornado” because of its cone-like shape. To show the impressive powers of James Webb to capture objects like this one in exquisite detail, you can compare the Spitzer image from 2006 and the new James Webb image.

If you look at the full image with all its details, you’ll notice an object in the top left which is located right at the tip of the tornado. When researchers first used Spitzer to observe this object, they noticed a fuzzy object here at the tip and wonder what it could be — but the image wasn’t detailed enough to show it in detail. Now, with Webb, it’s clear that the object is actually a spiral galaxy which is in the background, and which just happens to line up with the Herbig-Haro object as seen from Earth.

The object was observed using Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), which each look in slightly different portions of the infrared wavelength to build up a more detailed picture of the target. The instruments pick out the glowing hot molecules of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and dust, which are seen in red and orange.

These gases and dust grains are energized by the jets of material that come streaming off a protostar called Cederblad 110 IRS4, which is thought to be the source of the object. This particular star isn’t captured in the Webb image, but it is located off the bottom and to the right of the image.

This protostar is just a baby, at an age of tens of thousands to one million years old, compared to our sun which is 4.5 billion years old. However, the clouds of dust found in this region — caled the Chamaeleon I Cloud complex — are similar to what our sun could have originally formed from. Images like this one help scientists to understand the dramatic and tempestuous stages of early star development.