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By NASA
Flight Engineer Joe Acaba works in the U.S. Destiny laboratory module on the International Space Station, setting up hardware for the Zero Boil-Off Tank (ZBOT) experiment. Joe Acaba Space missions rely on cryogenic fluids — extremely cold liquids like liquid hydrogen and oxygen — for both propulsion and life support systems. These fuels must be kept at ultra-low cryogenic temperatures to remain in liquid form; however, solar heating and other sources of heat increase the rate of evaporation of the liquid and cause the pressure in the storage tank to increase. Current storage methods require venting the cryogenic propellant to space to control the pressure in fuel tanks.
NASA’s Zero Boil-Off Tank Noncondensables (ZBOT-NC) experiment is the continuation of Zero Boil-Off studies gathering crucial data to optimize fuel storage systems for space missions. The experiment will launch aboard Northrop Grumman’s 23rd resupply mission to the International Space Station.
When Cold Fuel Gets Too Warm
Even with multilayer insulation, heat unavoidably seeps into cryogenic fuel tanks from surrounding structures and the space environment, causing an increase in the liquid temperature and an associated increase in the evaporation rate. In turn, the pressure inside the tank increases. This process is called “boil-off” and the increase in tank pressure is referred to as “self-pressurization.”
Venting excess gas to the environment or space when this process occurs is highly undesirable and becomes mission-critical on extended journeys. If crew members used current fuel storage methods for a years-long Mars expedition, all propellant might be lost to boil-off before the trip ends.
NASA’s ZBOT experiments are investigating active pressure control methods to eliminate wasteful fuel venting. Specifically, active control through the use of jet mixing and other techniques are being evaluated and tested in the ZBOT series of experiments.
The Pressure Control Problem
ZBOT-NC further studies how noncondensable gases (NCGs) affect fuel tank behavior when present in spacecraft systems. NCGs don’t turn into liquid under the tank’s operating conditions and can affect tank pressure.
The investigation, which is led out of Glenn Research Center, will operate inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox aboard the space station to gather data on how NCGs affect volatile liquid behavior in microgravity. It’s part of an effort to advance cryogenic fluid management technologies and help NASA better understand low-gravity fluid behavior.
Researchers will measure pressure and temperature as they study how these gases change evaporation and condensation rates. Previous studies indicate the gases create barriers that could reduce a tank’s ability to maintain proper pressure control — a potentially serious issue for extended space missions.
How this benefits space exploration
The research directly supports Mars missions and other long-duration space travel by helping engineers design more efficient fuel storage systems and future space depots. The findings may also benefit scientific instruments on space telescopes and probes that rely on cryogenic fluids to maintain the extremely low temperatures needed for operation.
How this benefits humanity
The investigation could improve tank design models for medical, industrial, and energy production applications that depend on long-term cryogenic storage on Earth.
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NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division pioneers scientific discovery and enables exploration by using space environments to conduct investigations not possible on Earth. Studying biological and physical phenomenon under extreme conditions allows researchers to advance the fundamental scientific knowledge required to go farther and stay longer in space, while also benefitting life on Earth.
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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
Animation Video – “Exploring Star and Planet Formation”
Explore the jets emitted by young stars in multiple wavelengths: ViewSpace Interactive
Read more about Herbig-Haro objects
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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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The journal paper by Y. Cheng et al.
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Explore Webb 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 5 Min Read Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope
Webb captured this sparkling scene of star birth in Pismis 24. Full image and caption below. Credits:
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) This is a sparkling scene of star birth captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and radiation of nearby, massive, infant stars.
Called Pismis 24, this young star cluster resides in the core of the nearby Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Home to a vibrant stellar nursery and one of the closest sites of massive star birth, Pismis 24 provides rare insight into large and massive stars. Its proximity makes this region one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve.
At the heart of this glittering cluster is the brilliant Pismis 24-1. It is at the center of a clump of stars above the jagged orange peaks, and the tallest spire is pointing directly toward it. Pismis 24-1 appears as a gigantic single star, and it was once thought to be the most massive known star. Scientists have since learned that it is composed of at least two stars, though they cannot be resolved in this image. At 74 and 66 solar masses, respectively, the two known stars are still among the most massive and luminous stars ever seen.
Image A: Pismis 24 (NIRCam Image)
Webb captured this sparkling scene of star birth in Pismis 24, a young star cluster about 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. This region is one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) Captured in infrared light by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), this image reveals thousands of jewel-like stars of varying sizes and colors. The largest and most brilliant ones with the six-point diffraction spikes are the most massive stars in the cluster. Hundreds to thousands of smaller members of the cluster appear as white, yellow, and red, depending on their stellar type and the amount of dust enshrouding them. Webb also shows us tens of thousands of stars behind the cluster that are part of the Milky Way galaxy.
Super-hot, infant stars –some almost 8 times the temperature of the Sun – blast out scorching radiation and punishing winds that are sculpting a cavity into the wall of the star-forming nebula. That nebula extends far beyond NIRCam’s field of view. Only small portions of it are visible at the bottom and top right of the image. Streamers of hot, ionized gas flow off the ridges of the nebula, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks.
Dramatic spires jut from the glowing wall of gas, resisting the relentless radiation and winds. They are like fingers pointing toward the hot, young stars that have sculpted them. The fierce forces shaping and compressing these spires cause new stars to form within them. The tallest spire spans about 5.4 light-years from its tip to the bottom of the image. More than 200 of our solar systems out to Neptune’s orbit could fit into the width its tip, which is 0.14 lightyears.
In this image, the color cyan indicates hot or ionized hydrogen gas being heated up by the massive young stars. Dust molecules similar to smoke here on Earth are represented in orange. Red signifies cooler, denser molecular hydrogen. The darker the red, the denser the gas. Black denotes the densest gas, which is not emitting light. The wispy white features are dust and gas that are scattering starlight.
Video A: Expedition to Star Cluster Pismis 24
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This scientific visualization takes viewers on a journey to a glittering young star cluster called Pismis 24. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured this fantastical scene in the heart of the Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth. Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI), Christian Nieves (STScI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Script Writer: Frank Summers (STScI); Narration: Frank Summers (STScI); Music: Christian Nieves (STScI); Audio: Danielle Kirshenblat (STScI); Producer: Greg Bacon (STScI); Acknowledgment: VISTA Video B: Zoom to Pismis 24
This zoom-in video shows the location of the young star cluster Pismis 24 on the sky. It begins with a ground-based photo of the constellation Scorpius by the late astrophotographer Akira Fujii. The sequence closes in on the Lobster Nebula, using views from the Digitized Sky Survey. As the video homes in on a select portion, it fades to a VISTA image in infrared light. The zoom continues in to the region around Pismis 24, where it transitions to the stunning image captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light.
Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Narration: Frank Summers (STScI); Script Writer: Frank Summers (STScI); Music: Christian Nieves (STScI); Audio: Danielle Kirshenblat (STScI); Producer: Greg Bacon (STScI); Acknowledgment: VISTA, Akira Fujii, DSS 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
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Ann Jenkins – jenkins@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
Read more about Hubble’s view of Pismis 24
Listen to a sonification of Hubble’s view of Pismis 24
Animation Video: “How Dense Pillars Form in Molecular Clouds”
Read more: Webb’s Star Formation Discoveries
More Webb News
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Webb Science Themes
Webb Mission Page
Related For Kids
What is the Webb Telescope?
SpacePlace for Kids
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Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
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NASA/Nichole Ayers On July 26, 2025, NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers took this long-exposure photograph – taken over 31 minutes from a window inside the International Space Station’s Kibo laboratory module – capturing the circular arcs of star trails.
In its third decade of continuous human presence, the space station has a far-reaching impact as a microgravity lab hosting technology, demonstrations, and scientific investigations from a range of fields. The research done on the orbiting laboratory will inform long-duration missions like Artemis and future human expeditions to Mars.
Image credit: NASA/Nichole Ayers
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