Two still-forming stars are spewing out cosmic gas and dust that glow in infrared in this James Webb Space Telescope image.
The young stars – protostars in fact – have been ejecting gas and dust over tens of thousands of years.
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Some of these jets are fast, some are slow, and more recent jets are slamming into material from older, slower jets and causing the intricate twists and turns seen in the image.
What's more, astronomers say that chemical reactions within the ejections have produced a range of organic molecules like carbon monoxide and methanol.
What Webb has seen
At the centre of this egg-timer shape lie the two stars responsible for the streams.
The stars are housed in an opaque disk of cold gas and dust, comprising just one pixel of the image.
Further out, we can see bright light from the stars shining through thinner sections of dust.
The darker V-shapes are regions where the dust is so dense, not even Webb's infrared vision can peer through.
Zoom in to this area and you can see that Webb's NIRCam instrument has captured faint orange dots. These are stars.
More to learn
Astronomers say the James Webb Space Telescope has given them new insights into this target, which is known as Lynds 483, or L483.
It's named after astronomer Beverly T. Lynds, who studied and catalogued dark and bright nebulae in the 1960s.
Despite this, even Webb hasn't been able to capture the whole object in a single shot, focussing instead on the central region.
Astronomers are still attempting to fully explain the structure of the two outflows, but the aim is to calculate how much material has been expelled, what molecules were produced by colliding material and an overall view of the varying densities.
Astronomers also say that, millions of years from now, the stars will eventually finish forming.
They may become stars about the mass of our Sun.
The area now clear, there could even be a tiny disk of gas and dust remaining, out of which a new system of orbiting planets may one day form.
