NASA released one of Webb's largest images to date on Sept. 15: the star nursery IC 348, 1,000 light-years away. Here's what is hiding inside it.
IC 348 sits in the constellation Perseus, about 1,000 light-years from Earth. Ground-based survey telescopes see it like this: young stars in dust.
The headline find: brown dwarfs as light as twice Jupiter's mass, or 0.19% of the Sun's. NASA says they are the least massive brown dwarfs known.
Brown dwarfs form the way stars do but never grow heavy enough to burn hydrogen. These new ones weigh about what a big planet weighs.
Two stars sit buried in gas here. The one glowing orange is brightest at the longer infrared wavelengths Webb was built to see through dust.
Winds from the cluster's stars sculpt the surrounding gas into a huge curtained loop that glows as a reflection nebula.
The faint red curves near these stars are hot shockwaves: gas being slammed by outbursts from young stars still pulling in material.
These pink streamers are Herbig-Haro objects: jets from hidden protostars punching into thick cloud and lighting up where they hit.
Look past the nursery and whole spiral galaxies appear. They lie millions to billions of light-years beyond it, caught in the same frame.
NASA's numbered collage maps where each zoom-in sits, including a pair of galaxies where the nearer one's gravity warps the light of the farther.
NIRCam imaged IC 348 in 2024 and NIRSpec followed in 2025. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.