Hubble and Webb photograph a cat-shaped dust cloud where new stars are forming
The Cat's Head Nebula sits inside the Carina Nebula, about 7,500 light-years away.
The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have photographed a dark pillar of dust shaped like a cat sitting with its back turned, the European Space Agency said in an Oct. 29 release. Astronomers call it the Cat's Head Nebula.
It lies inside the Carina Nebula, a huge cloud of gas and dust about 7,500 light-years from Earth where stars are being born. The cat's glowing red "eye" may be a young star still wrapped in dust.
Reading the three images
The picture shows the same patch of sky three ways, left to right. None is an X-ray image: one is visible light, the kind our eyes see, and two are infrared, light just beyond red that our eyes cannot see but that passes through dust.
Left, Hubble, visible light: the pillar looks like solid, dark-brown dust. A hazy yellow rim along its right edge is gas being heated and boiled off by ultraviolet light from nearby massive stars. Hubble's filters pick up light given off by oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur.
Center, Webb, near-infrared: the dust turns partly see-through, revealing a crowd of hidden stars and even faint galaxies far beyond the Milky Way.
Right, Webb, mid-infrared: this view shows the glow of warm dust and carbon-based molecules, tracing delicate strands, plus a bright yellow spot that is likely a newborn star still buried in dust.
How long will the cat last?
The release calls the cat "a temporary scene that will eventually disperse." Ultraviolet light and winds from massive stars are eroding the cloud, and its denser dust resists "at least for now." The release gives no timetable. For comparison, a 2004 Hubble study of a similar dust globule in the Carina Nebula, nicknamed the "Defiant Finger," estimated it had roughly 200,000 years to 1 million years left before evaporating. So "will not last" means hundreds of thousands of years or more, not weeks or centuries.
What kind of nebula is it?
A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in space. NASA's Hubble material describes the main types: emission nebulae, whose gas glows because nearby hot stars energize it; reflection nebulae, dust that shines by scattering starlight, often blue; dark nebulae, dust thick enough to block the light behind it; planetary nebulae, shells of gas puffed off by dying sun-like stars; and supernova remnants, the debris of exploded massive stars, such as the Crab Nebula.
The Cat's Head is a dark nebula, a dense pillar of dust seen against glowing gas. It sits inside the Carina Nebula, an emission nebula and stellar nursery lit by massive stars. The images help scientists study how stars form.
Source: ESA/Webb release weic2622, Oct. 29, 2026; NASA Science, "Hubble's Nebulae" (NASA material, summarized by AI for the Daily News; NASA did not review this story); N. Smith, R. Barbá and N. Walborn, "Carina's Defiant Finger," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2004.