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By Dean Murray

Astronomers have captured a cosmic butterfly.

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope show a jaw-dropping view of a planet-forming disc, nicknamed the “Butterfly Star,” appearing to have wings.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has hailed the pictures as a “fantastic new view” of IRAS 04302+2247, located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region.

They said: “With Webb, researchers can study the properties and growth of dust grains within protoplanetary discs like this one, shedding light on the earliest stages of planet formation.”

Observations of distant protoplanetary discs can help researchers understand what took place roughly 4.5 billion years ago in our own solar system, when the Sun, Earth, and the other planets formed.

ESA said: “IRAS 04302+2247, or IRAS 04302 for short, is a beautiful example of a protostar – a young star that is still gathering mass from its environment – surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which baby planets might be forming.

“Given the appearance of the two reflection nebulas, IRAS 04302 has been nicknamed the ‘Butterfly Star.’”

A hidden alliance between algae and bacteria in the Eel River powers ecosystems, sustains salmon, and may inspire future clean technologies.

In northern California, salmon represent far more than a food source. They are central to tribal traditions, vital for tourism, and serve as indicators of river health. Working along the Eel River, researchers from NAU and the University of California Berkeley report the discovery of a microscopic nutrient engine that supports river health and helps salmon flourish.

Their new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains how algae and bacteria cooperate to provide a clean source of nitrogen. The partners convert nitrogen from the air into food that sustains the river ecosystem, avoiding the need for fertilizers and the pollution they can create. This hidden source of nutrients increases populations of aquatic insects that young salmon depend on for growth and survival.

At the core of the finding is a diatom called Epithemia, a single-celled aquatic plant encased in a glass-like shell. Although smaller than a grain of table salt and roughly the width of a human hair, Epithemia plays a major role in keeping rivers productive.

Each diatom contains bacterial partners known as diazoplasts, which are tiny nitrogen-fixing compartments that turn atmospheric nitrogen into plant food. Epithemia captures sunlight to make sugar, and the diazoplast uses that sugar to carry out nitrogen fixation. In return, the diazoplast supplies nitrogen that enables the diatom to continue photosynthesis.

“This is nature’s version of a clean nutrient pipeline, from sunlight to fish, without the runoff that creates harmful algal blooms,” said Jane Marks, biology professor at Northern Arizona University and lead author of the study.

A Seasonal Surge of Productivity

By late summer, Marks said, strands of the green alga Cladophora are draped with rusty-red Epithemia along the Eel River. At this stage, the algae–bacteria duos supply up to 90% of the new nitrogen entering the river’s food web, giving insect grazers the fuel they need and powering salmon from the bottom up.

“Healthy rivers don’t just happen—they’re maintained by ecological interactions, like this partnership,” said Mary Power, co-author of the study and faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Angelo Coast Range Reserve, where the field study took place. “When native species thrive in healthy food webs, rivers deliver clean water, wildlife, and essential support for fishing and outdoor communities.”

Using advanced imaging, the research team watched the partners trade life’s essentials in a perfect loop: The diatom used sunlight and carbon dioxide to make sugar and share it with the bacterium, which then used the sugar to turn nitrogen from the air into plant food. That nitrogen helped the diatom make even more sugar, because the key enzymes of photosynthesis need lots of nitrogen.

“It’s like a handshake deal: Both sides benefit, and the entire river thrives,” said Mike Zampini, a postdoctoral researcher at NAU and the study’s isotope tracing lead. “The result is a beautifully efficient cycle of energy and nutrients.”

A Global Phenomenon with Wide Implications

This partnership isn’t unique to the Eel River. Epithemia and similar diatom–diazoplast teams live in rivers, lakes, and oceans across the world, often in places where nitrogen is scarce. That means they may be quietly boosting productivity in many other ecosystems.

Beyond its role in nature, this clean and efficient nutrient exchange could inspire new technologies such as more efficient biofuels, natural fertilizers that don’t pollute or even crop plants engineered to make their own nitrogen, cutting costs for farmers while reducing environmental impacts.

When nature engineers solutions this elegant, Marks said, it reminds us what’s possible when people, places, and discovery come together.

Reference: “Ecosystem consequences of a nitrogen-fixing proto-organelle” by Jane C. Marks, Michael C. Zampini, Raina Fitzpatrick, Saeed H. Kariunga, Augustine Sitati, Ty J. Samo, Peter K. Weber, Steven Thomas, Bruce A. Hungate, Christina E. Ramon, Michael Wulf, Victor O. Leshyk, Egbert Schwartz, Jennifer Pett-Ridge and Mary E. Power, 8 September 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2503108122

The research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Rules of Life/Microbiome program (#2125088). Research at Lawrence Livermore National Labs was conducted under U.S. Department of Energy Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

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Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on his screen. They pulsed, grew and blossomed into monarch butterflies. As the two butterflies grew, they smashed into each other, and one got the worst of it; its wing withered away. But just as it seemed like a goner, the mutilated butterfly did a kind of backflip and grew a new wing like a salamander regrowing a lost leg.

Mordvintsev, a research scientist at Google Research in Zurich, had not deliberately bred his virtual butterflies to regenerate lost body parts; it happened spontaneously. That was his first inkling, he said, that he was onto something. His project built on a decades-old tradition of creating cellular automata: miniature, chessboard-like computational worlds governed by bare-bones rules. The most famous, the Game of Life, first popularized in 1970, has captivated generations of computer scientists, biologists and physicists, who see it as a metaphor for how a few basic laws of physics can give rise to the vast diversity of the natural world.

In 2020, Mordvintsev brought this into the era of deep learning by creating neural cellular automata, or NCAs. Instead of starting with rules and applying them to see what happened, his approach started with a desired pattern and figured out what simple rules would produce it. “I wanted to reverse this process: to say that here is my objective,” he said. With this inversion, he has made it possible to do “complexity engineering,” as the physicist and cellular-automata researcher Stephen Wolfram proposed in 1986 — namely, to program the building blocks of a system so that they will self-assemble into whatever form you want. “Imagine you want to build a cathedral, but you don’t design a cathedral,” Mordvintsev said. “You design a brick. What shape should your brick be that, if you take a lot of them and shake them long enough, they build a cathedral for you?”

Such a brick sounds almost magical, but biology is replete with examples of basically that. A starling murmuration or ant colony acts as a coherent whole, and scientists have postulated simple rules that, if each bird or ant follows them, explain the collective behavior.  Similarly, the cells of your body play off one another to shape themselves into a single organism. NCAs are a model for that process, except that they start with the collective behavior and automatically arrive at the rules.

The possibilities this presents are potentially boundless. If biologists can figure out how Mordvintsev’s butterfly can so ingeniously regenerate a wing, maybe doctors can coax our bodies to regrow a lost limb. For engineers, who often find inspiration in biology, these NCAs are a potential new model for creating fully distributed computers that perform a task without central coordination. In some ways, NCAs may be innately better at problem-solving than neural networks.

Life’s Dreams

Mordvintsev was born in 1985 and grew up in the Russian city of Miass, on the eastern flanks of the Ural Mountains. He taught himself to code on a Soviet-era IBM PC clone by writing simulations of planetary dynamics, gas diffusion and ant colonies. “The idea that you can create a tiny universe inside your computer and then let it run, and have this simulated reality where you have full control, always fascinated me,” he said.

He landed a job at Google’s lab in Zurich in 2014, just as a new image-recognition technology based on multilayer, or “deep,” neural networks was sweeping the tech industry. For all their power, these systems were (and arguably still are) troublingly inscrutable. “I realized that, OK, I need to figure out how it works,” he said.

He came up with “deep dreaming,” a process that takes whatever patterns a neural network discerns in an image, then exaggerates them for effect. For a while, the phantasmagoria that resulted — ordinary photos turned into a psychedelic trip of dog snouts, fish scales and parrot feathers — filled the internet. Mordvintsev became an instant software celebrity.

Among the many scientists who reached out to him was Michael Levin of Tufts University, a leading developmental biologist. If neural networks are inscrutable, so are biological organisms, and Levin was curious whether something like deep dreaming might help to make sense of them, too. Levin’s email reawakened Mordvintsev’s fascination with simulating nature, especially with cellular automata.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

More Webb News

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Webb Science Themes

Webb Mission Page

What is the Webb Telescope?

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