Tour of the Serpens Nebula

This video tours the Serpens Nebula, a star-forming region that lies 1,300 light-years away from Earth. A new image of Serpens from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows an intriguing group of aligned protostellar outflows within one region of the nebula. Protostellar outflows are formed when jets of gas spewing from newborn stars collide with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This region is also home to several captivating features—the flapping shadow of a planet-forming disk, nicknamed the “Bat Shadow,” areas of varying density that appear as crevices, and a special binary protostar.