Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2025

MAY-JUNE 2025 Webb peers deeper into mysterious Flame Nebula T he Flame Nebula, located about 1,400 light-years away from Earth, is a hotbed of star formation less than 1 million years old. Within the Flame Nebula, there are objects so small that their cores will never be able to fuse hydrogen like full-fledged stars — brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs, often called “failed stars,” over time become very dim and much cooler than stars. These factors make observing brown dwarfs by NASA/ESA/CSA Matthew Brown Christine Pulliam T his collage of images from the Flame Nebula shows a near-infrared light view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on the left, while the two insets at the right show the near-infrared view taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Much of the dark, dense gas and dust, as well as the surrounding white clouds within the Hubble image, have been cleared in the Webb images, giving us a view into a more translucent cloud pierced by the infrared-producing objects within that are young stars and brown dwarfs. Astronomers used Webb to take a census of the lowest-mass objects within this star-forming region. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Michael Meyer (University of Michigan), Matthew De Furio (UT Austin), Massimo Robberto (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)] distances from the Sun. When they are very young, however, they are with most telescopes difficult, if not impossible, even at cosmically short