James Webb Space Telescope peers into a dying star surrounded by mysterious buckyballs: 'The structures we're seeing now are breathtaking'

A cloud of blue, white with a ring of red light around it on a black background.

The spectacular birthplace of weird carbon molecules known as "buckyballs" came to light in new imagery of a nebula from the James Webb Space Telescope. The gas cloud includes an upside-down question mark shape, which marks a structure scientists don't yet understand.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered 10,000 light-years into space to trace the origin of buckyballs, which are large and hollow molecules resembling a soccer ball. The gas cloud the observatory imaged, known as Tc1, came from a dying star, in the constellation Ara (Latin for "alter") in the southern hemisphere.