Webb telescope reveals over 130 young stars hidden inside nebula NGC 7129

By the Everything Space news desk · 21 Oct 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Universe Today

Infrared imaging pierces thick dust in a nearby stellar nursery, showing how young stars shape the gas clouds that birthed them.

A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope has exposed stars forming deep within NGC 7129, a dusty stellar nursery located about 3,300 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. The infrared capabilities of Webb allowed astronomers to see through dust clouds that typically block visible-light telescopes, revealing stars younger than 1 million years old.

More than 130 stars have now been identified within the cluster, each at different stages of formation depending on their mass. The most massive and developed among them is a central star called LkH-alpha 234, estimated at 5 to 8 times the mass of the Sun, which is nearing the end of its formation phase and will soon begin fusing hydrogen.

As stars like LkH-alpha 234 heat up, they warm the surrounding gas and dust, making it visible to Webb's instruments. The image shows hot hydrogen gas glowing gold on one side, while cooler gas disturbed by outflows from young stars appears red on the other. These outflows have also carved out a cavity in the nebula, and the resulting compression of gas has triggered further star formation within that space.

Several of the pre-main-sequence stars in the region produce stellar winds that create small shockwaves, forming additional cavities nearby. These winds, along with the main cavity's outward pressure, interact with cooler, denser gas at the cavity's edges, forming a sharp ridge and a boundary region where hydrogen molecules break apart into individual atoms.

Elsewhere in the image, a bright blue nebula is lit from within by a young star surrounded by a disk-shaped ring of material, with additional outflows visible nearby. The level of detail in Webb's data builds on earlier observations by the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, and researchers say continued study of the region will help explain how forming stars reshape the clouds around them over time.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.