James Webb Space Telescope images bacteria-size dust grains — they'll likely turn into exoplanets

Two glowing blue disks sandwich an orange disk and there's a pink jet flowing vertically through the entire thing.

The image above may look similar to a combat scene in an Avengers movie, but it's actually a uniquely lit-up view of the dust and gas around a distant newborn star.

Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), this celestial spectacle, known as Herbig Haro 30 or HH 30, highlights a luminous region around a star only half a million years old residing in the constellation Taurus. While the young star itself is obscured by the dense dust disk that embeds it, the intense winds and fast-moving jets it blasts into space collide with the sparser gas and dust above and below the disk, creating shockwaves that heat the material, causing it to glow.