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By NASA
NASA; JAXA The Milky Way appears above Earth’s bright atmospheric glow in this Aug. 23, 2025, photograph from the International Space Station as it soared 261 miles above southern Iran at approximately 12:54 a.m. local time. The camera was configured for low light and long duration settings.
Our home galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, enough gas and dust to make billions more stars, and at least ten times as much dark matter as all the stars and gas put together. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – slated to launch no later than May 2027 – will help scientists better understand the gas and dust strewn between stars in our galaxy, known as the interstellar medium.
Image credit: NASA; JAXA
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By NASA
The IAU (International Astronomical Union), an international non-governmental research organization and global naming authority for celestial objects, has approved official names for features on Donaldjohanson, an asteroid NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited on April 20. In a nod to the fossilized inspiration for the names of the asteroid and spacecraft, the IAU’s selections recognize significant sites and discoveries on Earth that further our understanding of humanity’s origins.
The asteroid was named in 2015 after paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of one of the most famous fossils ever found of a female hominin, or ancient human ancestor, nicknamed Lucy. Just as the Lucy fossil revolutionized our understanding of human evolution, NASA’s Lucy mission aims to revolutionize our understanding of solar system evolution by studying at least eight Trojan asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter.
Postcard commemorating NASA’s Lucy spacecraft April 20, 2025, encounter with the asteroid Donaldjohanson. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Donaldjohanson, located in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, was a target for Lucy because it offered an opportunity for a comprehensive “dress rehearsal” for Lucy’s main mission, with all three of its science instruments carrying out observation sequences very similar to the ones that will occur at the Trojans.
After exploring the asteroid and getting to see its features up close, the Lucy science and engineering team proposed to name the asteroid’s surface features in recognition of significant paleoanthropological sites and discoveries, which the IAU accepted.
The smaller lobe is called Afar Lobus, after the Ethiopian region where Lucy and other hominin fossils were found. The larger lobe is named Olduvai Lobus, after the Tanzanian river gorge that has also yielded many important hominin discoveries.
The asteroid’s neck, Windover Collum, which joins those two lobes, is named after the Windover Archeological Site near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida — where NASA’s Lucy mission launched in 2021. Human remains and artifacts recovered from that site revolutionized our understanding of the people who lived in Florida around 7,300 years ago.
Officially recognized names of geologic features on the asteroid Donaldjohanson. NASA Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL Two smooth areas on the asteroid’s neck are named Hadar Regio, marking the specific site of Johanson’s discovery of the Lucy fossil, and Minatogawa Regio, after the location where the oldest known hominins in Japan were found. Select boulders and craters on Donaldjohanson are named after notable fossils ranging from pre-Homo sapiens hominins to ancient modern humans. The IAU also approved a coordinate system for mapping features on this uniquely shaped small world.
As of Sept. 9, the Lucy spacecraft was nearly 300 million miles (480 million km) from the Sun en route to its August 2027 encounter with its first Trojan asteroid called Eurybates. This places Lucy about three quarters of the way through the main asteroid belt. Since its encounter with Donaldjohanson, Lucy has been cruising without passing close to any other asteroids, and without requiring any trajectory correction maneuvers.
The team continues to carefully monitor the instruments and spacecraft as it travels farther from the Sun into a cooler environment.
Stay tuned at nasa.gov/lucy for more updates as Lucy continues its journey toward the never-before-explored Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute
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By NASA
Explore Webb Science James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NASA’s Webb Observes Immense… Webb News Latest News Latest Images Webb’s Blog Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Webb Timeline Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Science Explainers Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Webb’s First Images Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet. Full image shown below. Credits:
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system. The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualifies it as rare, say researchers.
Streaking across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, the outflow resembles a double-bladed dueling lightsaber from the Star Wars films. The central protostar, weighing as much as ten of our Suns, is located 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of our galaxy.
The Webb discovery was serendipitous. “We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation. Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy,” said lead author Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
Image A: Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) This unique class of stellar fireworks are highly collimated jets of plasma shooting out from newly forming stars. Such jetted outflows are a star’s spectacular “birth announcement” to the universe. Some of the infalling gas building up around the central star is blasted along the star’s spin axis, likely under the influence of magnetic fields.
Today, while hundreds of protostellar jets have been observed, these are mainly from low-mass stars. These spindle-like jets offer clues into the nature of newly forming stars. The energetics, narrowness, and evolutionary time scales of protostellar jets all serve to constrain models of the environment and physical properties of the young star powering the outflow.
“I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it,” said co-author Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Its detection offers evidence that protostellar jets must scale up with the mass of the star powering them. The more massive the stellar engine propelling the plasma, the larger the gusher’s size.
The jet’s detailed filamentary structure, captured by Webb’s crisp resolution in infrared light, is evidence the jet is plowing into interstellar dust and gas. This creates separate knots, bow shocks, and linear chains.
The tips of the jet, lying in opposite directions, encapsulate the history of the star’s formation. “Originally the material was close into the star, but over 100,000 years the tips were propagating out, and then the stuff behind is a younger outflow,” said Tan.
Outlier
At nearly twice the distance from the galactic center as our Sun, the host proto-cluster that’s home to the voracious jet is on the periphery of our Milky Way galaxy.
Within the cluster, a few hundred stars are still forming. Being in the galactic hinterlands means the stars are deficient in heavier elements beyond hydrogen and helium. This is measured as metallicity, which gradually increases over cosmic time as each passing stellar generation expels end products of nuclear fusion through winds and supernovae. The low metallicity of Sh2-284 is a reflection of its relatively pristine nature, making it a local analog for the environments in the early universe that were also deficient in heavier elements.
“Massive stars, like the one found inside this cluster, have very important influences on the evolution of galaxies. Our discovery is shedding light on the formation mechanism of massive stars in low metallicity environments, so we can use this massive star as a laboratory to study what was going on in earlier cosmic history,” said Cheng.
Unrolling Stellar Tapestry
Stellar jets, which are powered by the gravitational energy released as a star grows in mass, encode the formation history of the protostar.
“Webb’s new images are telling us that the formation of massive stars in such environments could proceed via a relatively stable disk around the star that is expected in theoretical models of star formation known as core accretion,” said Tan. “Once we found a massive star launching these jets, we realized we could use the Webb observations to test theories of massive star formation. We developed new theoretical core accretion models that were fit to the data, to basically tell us what kind of star is in the center. These models imply that the star is about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is still growing and has been powering this outflow.”
For more than 30 years, astronomers have disagreed about how massive stars form. Some think a massive star requires a very chaotic process, called competitive accretion.
In the competitive accretion model, material falls in from many different directions so that the orientation of the disk changes over time. The outflow is launched perpendicularly, above and below the disk, and so would also appear to twist and turn in different directions.
“However, what we’ve seen here, because we’ve got the whole history – a tapestry of the story – is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other. That tells us that this central disk is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory,” said Tan.
Where there’s one massive star, there could be others in this outer frontier of the Milky Way. Other massive stars may not yet have reached the point of firing off Roman-candle-style outflows. Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, also presented in this study, has found another dense stellar core that could be in an earlier stage of construction.
The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
Related Information
View more: Webb images of other protostar outflows – HH 49/50, L483, HH 46/47, and HH 211
View more: Data visualization of protostar outflows – HH 49/50
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Explore the jets emitted by young stars in multiple wavelengths: ViewSpace Interactive
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Related Images & Videos
Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Image)
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars–the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.
Stellar Jet in Sh2-284 (NIRCam Compass Image)
This image of the stellar jet in Sh2-284, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.
Immense Stellar Jet in Sh2-284
This video shows the relative size of two different protostellar jets imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The first image shown is an extremely large protostellar jet located in Sh2-284, 15,000 light-years away from Earth. The outflows from the massive central prot…
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2025 Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Contact Media Laura Betz
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland
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James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Astrophysics Goddard Space Flight Center Science & Research Stars The Universe
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The journal paper by Y. Cheng et al.
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By NASA
NASA science and American industry have worked hand-in-hand for more than 60 years, transforming novel technologies created with NASA research into commercial products like cochlear implants, memory-foam mattresses, and more. Now, a NASA-funded device for probing the interior of storm systems has been made a key component of commercial weather satellites.
The novel atmospheric sounder was originally developed for NASA’s TROPICS (short for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats), which launched in 2023. Boston-based weather technology company Tomorrow.io integrated the same instrument design into some of its satellites.
NASA’s TROPICS instrument. TROPICS pioneered a novel, compact atmospheric sound now flying aboard a fleet of commercial small satellites created by the weather technology company Tomorrow.io.Credit: Blue Canyon Technologies Atmospheric sounders allow researchers to gather data describing humidity, temperature, and wind speed — important factors for weather forecasting and atmospheric analysis. From low-Earth orbit, these devices help make air travel safer, shipping more efficient, and severe weather warnings more reliable.
Novel tools for Observing Storm Systems
In the early 2000s, meteorologists and atmospheric chemists were eager to find a new science tool that could peer deep inside storm systems and do so multiple times a day. At the same time, CubeSat constellations (groupings of satellites each no larger than a shoebox) were emerging as promising, low-cost platforms for increasing the frequency with which individual sensors could pass over fast-changing storms, which improves the accuracy of weather models.
The challenge was to create an instrument small enough to fit aboard a satellite the size of a toaster, yet powerful enough to observe the innermost mechanisms of storm development. Preparing these technologies required years of careful development that was primarily supported by NASA’s Earth Science Division.
William Blackwell and his team at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, accepted this challenge and set out to miniaturize vital components of atmospheric sounders. “These were instruments the size of a washing machine, flying on platforms the size of a school bus,” said Blackwell, the principal investigator for TROPICS. “How in the world could we shrink them down to the size of a coffee mug?”
With a 2010 award from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), Blackwell’s team created an ultra-compact microwave receiver, a component that can sense the microwave radiation within the interior of storms.
The Lincoln Lab receiver weighed about a pound and took up less space than a hockey puck. This innovation paved the way for a complete atmospheric sounder instrument small enough to fly aboard a CubeSat. “The hardest part was figuring out how to make a compact back-end to this radiometer,” Blackwell said. “So without ESTO, this would not have happened. That initial grant was critical.”
In 2023, that atmospheric sounder was sent into space aboard four TROPICS CubeSats, which have been collecting torrents of data on the interior of severe storms around the world.
Transition to Industry
By the time TROPICS launched, Tomorrow.io developers knew they wanted Blackwell’s microwave receiver technology aboard their own fleet of commercial weather satellites. “We looked at two or three different options, and TROPICS was the most capable instrument of those we looked at,” said Joe Munchak, a senior atmospheric data scientist at Tomorrow.io.
In 2022, the company worked with Blackwell to adapt his team’s design into a CubeSat platform about twice the size of the one used for TROPICS. A bigger platform, Blackwell explained, meant they could bolster the sensor’s capabilities.
“When we first started conceptualizing this, the 3-unit CubeSat was the only game in town. Now we’re using a 6-unit CubeSat, so we have room for onboard calibration,” which improves the accuracy and reliability of gathered data, Blackwell said.
Tomorrow.io’s first atmospheric sounders, Tomorrow-S1 and Tomorrow-S2, launched in 2024. By the end of 2025, the company plans to have a full constellation of atmospheric sounders in orbit. The company also has two radar instruments that were launched in 2023 and were influenced by NASA’s RainCube instrument — the first CubeSat equipped with an active precipitation radar.
More CubeSats leads to more accurate weather data because there are more opportunities each day — revisits — to collect data. “With a fleet size of 18, we can easily get our revisit rate down to under an hour, maybe even 40 to 45 minutes in most places. It has a huge impact on short-term forecasts,” Munchak said.
Having access to an atmospheric sounder that had already flown in space and had more than 10 years of testing was extremely useful as Tomorrow.io planned its fleet. “It would not have been possible to do this nearly as quickly or nearly as affordably had NASA not paved the way,” said Jennifer Splaingard, Tomorrow.io’s senior vice president for space and sensors.
A Cycle of Innovation
The relationship between NASA and industry is symbiotic. NASA and its grantees can drive innovation and test new tools, equipping American businesses with novel technologies they may otherwise be unable to develop on their own. In exchange, NASA gains access to low-cost data sets that can supplement information gathered through its larger science missions.
Tomorrow.io was among eight companies selected by NASA’s Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition (CSDA) program in September 2024 to equip NASA with data that will help improve weather forecasting models. “It really is a success story of technology transfer. It’s that sweet spot, where the government partners with tech companies to really take an idea, a proven concept, and run with it,” Splaingard said.
By Gage Taylor
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 02, 2025 Related Terms
Earth Hurricanes & Typhoons TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats) View the full article
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