IC 348

Our six-story stays with Webb but comes much closer to home, only about 1,000 light-years away, which, in astronomy, practically counts as the neighborhood.

The region is called IC 348.

It is a stellar nursery.

Cold clouds of gas and dust are collapsing there and creating new stars.

Brown Dwarfs A brown dwarf forms a little like a star but never becomes massive enough to sustain ordinary hydrogen fusion.

They sit in the strange territory between stars and giant planets.

And Webb has found examples in IC 348 with masses only about twice that of Jupiter.

That is smaller than astronomers expected the star formation process to be able to produce.