About 5,500 light-years away from Earth, a dramatic scene of stars being born unfolds.

A new image released this week, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared camera, looks like it could be a mountaintop made of stardust, with a dramatic peak and crags.

In reality, according to the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, the image shows a cloud of cosmic gas that is being “carved” by radiation and wind from massive newborn stars.

What the image shows

The bright, six-pointed figures in the middle of the image make up a group of stars called Pismis 24. The cluster is “one of the closest sites of massive star birth,” according to Webb officials, making it an excellent site for scientists to study to understand star birth and formation.

The young stars in that cluster, some of which are almost eight times as hot as our sun, are constantly pushing out radiation and stellar wind that sculpt cavities into the surrounding nebula — the areas of orange and red gas shown in the image.

The compressing and shaping of those gassy areas in the nebula cause new stars to be born, officials with the Space Telescope Science Institute said.

The stars in Baltimore

In a concrete office building on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore are the only people who regularly communicate with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is more than a million miles away in outer space.

A staff of a few dozen works in shifts to communicate with the spacecraft, which can largely manage itself. Other teams work to translate the data the telescope collects into the stunning images shared with the public.

The Space Telescope Science Institute also performs science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in space since 1990. The institute is not part of NASA, but operates on its behalf through contract work.