Stunning set of 400 rings in ‘reflection’ nebula solves 30-year mystery of star formation — Space photo of the week

0 0 2 minutes read

Stunning set of 400 rings in ‘reflection’ nebula solves 30-year mystery of star formation — Space photo of the week

Composite image of the NGC 1333 star forming region obtained by combining data from the Subaru 8.2m Telescope and the Digitized Sky Survey. (Image credit: NAOJ, NOAO/AURA/NSF, Robert Gendler, Roberto Colombari)

QUICK FACTS

What is this : Reflection nebula NGC 1333 and binary star system SVS 13

Where it is: 1,000 light years away in the constellation Perseus

When it was shared: December 16, 2025.

Go outside after dark this winter and look to the southeast, and you’ll see some of the brightest stars in the night sky: Orion’s Belt, Betelgeuse, Sirius, Aldabaran, and Capella. Just above this fray is the quieter constellation of Perseus, which lacks bright stars but is home to something extraordinary that the naked eye can’t see: the explosive birth of new stars.

NGC 1333, nicknamed the Embryo Nebula, hides in the Perseus Molecular Cloud because it contains many young, hot stars that teach astronomers what happens when a star is born. NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by intense light from newly formed stars, some of which appear to regularly spew jets of material. It is one of the closest star forming regions to our solar system. On December 16, astronomers published the most detailed images ever seen of a jet launched by a newborn star, called SVS 13, which revealed a sequence of interlocking ring-shaped structures. This discovery proves that the star has been exploding – releasing an immense amount of energy – for decades.

The discovery, described by the researchers in the journal Natural astronomymarks the first direct observational confirmation of a long-standing theoretical model for how young stars feed on, then explosively expel, surrounding matter.

Researchers captured a high-resolution 3D view of a fast jet emitted by one of SVS 13’s young stars using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope array in Chile. In the image, they identified more than 400 ultra-thin arc-shaped molecular rings. Like the tree rings that mark the passage of time, each ring marks the continuation of an energetic surge from the beginnings of the young star’s history. Remarkably, the younger ring corresponds to a burst of light observed in the SVS 13 system in the early 1990s, allowing researchers to directly link a specific burst of activity in a forming star with a change in the speed of its jet. Sudden bursts of jet activity are thought to be caused by large amounts of gas falling on a young star.

“These images give us a whole new way to read the story of a young star,” said the study co-author. Gary Fullerprofessor at the University of Manchester. “Each group of rings is actually a timestamp of a past flare. This gives us important new insight into the growth of young stars and how their developing planetary systems are shaped.”

For more sublime space images, check out our Archives of space photo of the week.