James Webb Space Telescope investigates the origins of 'failed stars' in the Flame Nebula

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.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has probed deep into the dusty shroud of a young nebula alight with star formation on the hunt for "failed star" brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs are stellar objects that are born like stars but fail to gather enough matter to reach the masses needed to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores. These bodies with masses between 13 and 75 times the mass of Jupiter (or 1.3% to 7.5% the mass of the sun) are, therefore, much fainter than regular main sequence stars, despite the fact that some nuclear fusion does happen within them.