NASA’s Webb Peers Deeper into Mysterious Flame Nebula

NASA · 2025-03-10T14:00:00Z

6 Min Read

NASA’s Webb Peers Deeper into Mysterious Flame Nebula

A collage of three near-infrared images showing a dusty nebula. The left two-thirds of the collage is taken up by a Hubble image of the nebula. The remaining third is taken up by two Webb images, one atop the other. The Hubble image has a pillar of dense brown dust running through the nebula at a diagonal from 5 o’clock to 11 o’clock. Wispy plumes appear to fly off from the pillar toward the sides amid blue clouds of the same material, which are whiter near the pillar. There are many white stars spread throughout. Two separate, white squares, tilted about 30 degrees, outline two areas in the pillar. The upper square has the letter “A” to the top right, while the lower square is marked by the letter “B”. These labels correspond to the two, magnified images of the nebula at right, with the top image also labeled “A” and the bottom image labeled “B”. Both images contain a mixture of reds, blues and browns, and show red, blue, and white stars.

This 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.

Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Meyer (University of Michigan), A. Pagan (STScI)

The 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 with most telescopes difficult, if not impossible, even at cosmically short distances from the Sun. When they are very young, however, they are still relatively warmer and brighter and therefore easier to observe despite the obscuring, dense dust and gas that comprises the Flame Nebula in this case.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can pierce this dense, dusty region and see the faint infrared glow from young brown dwarfs. A team of astronomers used this capability to explore the lowest mass limit of brown dwarfs within the Flame Nebula. The result, they found, were free-floating objects roughly two to three times the mass of Jupiter, although they were sensitive down to 0.5 times the mass of Jupiter.

“The goal of this project was to explore the fundamental low-mass limit of the star and brown dwarf formation process. With Webb, we’re able to probe the faintest and lowest mass objects,” said lead study author Matthew De Furio of the University of Texas at Austin.

Image A: Flame Nebula: Hubble and Webb Observations

This 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.
The Hubble image on the left represents light at wavelengths of 1.05 microns (filter F105W) as blue, 1.3 microns (F130N) as green, and 1.39 microns (F129M) as red. The two Webb images on the right represent light at wavelengths of 1.15 microns and 1.4 microns (filters F115W and F140M) as blue, 1.82 microns (F182M) as green, 3.6 microns (F360M) as orange, and 4.3 microns (F430M) as red.

NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Meyer (University of Michigan), A. Pagan (STScI)

Smaller Fragments

The low-mass limit the team sought is set by a process called fragmentation. In this process large molecular clouds, from which both stars and brown dwarfs are born, break apart into smaller and smaller units, or fragments.

Fragmentation is highly dependent on several factors with the balance between temperature, thermal pressure, and gravity being among the most important. More specifically, as fragments contract under the force of gravity, their cores heat up. If a core is massive enough, it will begin to fuse hydrogen. The outward pressure created by that fusion counteracts gravity, stopping collapse and stabilizing the object (then known as a star). However, fragments whose cores are not compact and hot enough to burn hydrogen continue to contract as long as they radiate away their internal heat.

“The cooling of these clouds is important because if you have enough internal energy, it will fight that gravity,” says Michael Meyer of the University of Michigan. “If the clouds cool efficiently, they collapse and break apart.”

Fragmentation stops when a fragment becomes opaque enough to reabsorb its own radiation, thereby stopping the cooling and preventing further collapse. Theories placed the lower limit of these fragments anywhere between one and ten Jupiter masses. This study significantly shrinks that range as Webb’s census counted up fragments of different masses within the nebula.

“As found in many previous studies, as you go to lower masses, you actually get more objects up to about ten times the mass of Jupiter. In our study with the James Webb Space Telescope, we are sensitive down to 0.5 times the mass of Jupiter, and we are finding significantly fewer and fewer things as you go below ten times the mass of Jupiter,” De Furio explained. “We find fewer five-Jupiter-mass objects than ten-Jupiter-mass objects, and we find way fewer three-Jupiter-mass objects than five-Jupiter-mass objects. We don’t really find any objects below two or three Jupiter masses, and we expect to see them if they are there, so we are hypothesizing that this could be the limit itself.”

Meyer added, “Webb, for the first time, has been able to probe up to and beyond that limit. If that limit is real, there really shouldn’t be any one-Jupiter-mass objects free-floating out in our Milky Way galaxy, unless they were formed as planets and then ejected out of a planetary system.”

Image B: Low Mass Objects within the Flame Nebula in Infrared Light

A collage of four images showing a dusty nebula. Two-thirds of the collage is taken up by a single image of the nebula, while the remaining third shows three insets stacked on top of each other. In the largest image at left, there is an orange and yellow fang-like cloud of matter that cuts the image in two. The left side of the fang shows more clouds of a dark brown shade, while the right shows filaments of light brown. There are a number of bright blue and red points of light spread throughout, three of which are circled in white and labeled with a number from one to three. Circle 1 is located at about 12 o’clock in the middle of the fang-like cloud, while Circle 2 is at about 5 o’clock and Circle 3 is located at about 7 o’clock, toward the bottom left of the image. Each circle magnifies an individual object, which is shown in each of the three squares to the right of the collage, labeled 1 to 3 from top to bottom. Each image contains a single, fuzzy point of light in the middle.

This near-infrared image of a portion of the Flame Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope highlights three low-mass objects, seen in the insets to the right. These objects, which are much colder than protostars, require the sensitivity of Webb’s instruments to detect them. These objects were studied as part of an effort to explore the lowest mass limit of brown dwarfs within the Flame Nebula.
The Webb images represent light at wavelengths of 1.15 microns and 1.4 microns (filters F115W and F140M) as blue, 1.82 microns (F182M) as green, 3.6 microns (F360M) as orange, and 4.3 microns (F430M) as red.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. Meyer (University of Michigan)

Building on Hubble’s Legacy

Brown dwarfs, given the difficulty of finding them, have a wealth of information to provide, particularly in star formation and planetary research given their similarities to both stars and planets. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been on the hunt for these brown dwarfs for decades.

Even though Hubble can’t observe the brown dwarfs in the Flame Nebula to as low a mass as Webb can, it was crucial in identifying candidates for further study. This study is an example of how Webb took the baton—decades of Hubble data from the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex—and enabled in-depth research.

“It’s really difficult to do this work, looking at brown dwarfs down to even ten Jupiter masses, from the ground, especially in regions like this. And having existing Hubble data over the last 30 years or so allowed us to know that this is a really useful star-forming region to target. We needed to have Webb to be able to study this particular science topic,” said De Furio.

“It’s a quantum leap in our capabilities between understanding what was going on from Hubble. Webb is really opening an entirely new realm of possibilities, understanding these objects,” explained astronomer Massimo Robberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

This team is continuing to study the Flame Nebula, using Webb’s spectroscopic tools to further characterize the different objects within its dusty cocoon.

“There’s a big overlap between the things that could be planets and the things that are very, very low mass brown dwarfs,” Meyer stated. “And that’s our job in the next five years: to figure out which is which and why.”

These results are accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Image C (Animated): Flame Nebula (Hubble and Webb Comparison)

This video alternates between a Hubble Space Telescope and a James Webb Space Telescope observation of the Flame Nebula, a nearby star-forming nebula less than 1 million years old. In this comparison, three low-mass objects are highlighted. In Hubble’s observation, the low-mass objects are hidden by the region’s dense dust and gas. However, the objects are brought out in the Webb observation due to Webb's sensitivity to faint infrared light.

This animated image alternates between a Hubble Space Telescope and a James Webb Space Telescope observation of the Flame Nebula, a nearby star-forming nebula less than 1 million years old. In this comparison, three low-mass objects are highlighted. In Hubble’s observation, the low-mass objects are hidden by the region’s dense dust and gas. However, the objects are brought out in the Webb observation due to Webb’s sensitivity to faint infrared light.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).