Rice University astronomer Megan Reiter takes a “deep dive” into images from the Webb Telescope

Rice University astronomer Megan Reiter and colleagues took a “deep dive” into one of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and were rewarded with the discovery of telltale signs from two dozen previously unseen young stars about 7,500 light years from Earth.

The published research in the December issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers a glimpse of what astronomers will find with Webb’s near-infrared camera. The instrument is designed to peer through clouds of interstellar dust that have previously blocked astronomers’ view of stellar nurseries, especially those that produce stars similar to Earth’s sun .

Reiter, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and co-authors from the California Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, Queen Mary University in London and the United Kingdom’s Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, analyzed a portion of Webb’s first images of the Cosmic Cliffs , a star-forming region in a cluster of stars known as NGC 3324.

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