 Here we are zooming into the dark nebula LDN 1527. Dark nebula like this one contain dense dust clouds that can collapse into stars. We covered how this works in the How Old Are Stars chapter of the How Old Is It video book. The visible light created by the forming stars cannot penetrate the dust clouds, but infrared light can. Here's the James Webb infrared camera image of protostar L1527 inside this dark cloud nebula. The collapsing cloud triggers high temperatures at the dense center and forms a protoplanetary disk around the core. Here the disk is seen edge on. The protostar itself is hidden from view within the neck of this hourglass shape. Light from the protostar leaks out the right and left of this disk, illuminating cavities within the surrounding gas and dust. The distance from end to end is 17,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun. The region's most prevalent features, the blue and orange clouds, outlined cavities created as material ejected by the protostar collides with the surrounding matter. The blue areas are where the dust is thinnest. In the thicker layers of dust, less blue light is able to escape, creating pockets of orange. This protostar is a relatively young body, about 100,000 years old. Given its age and its brightness in far infrared light, it is considered to be in the earliest stages of star formation. Its mass is somewhere between 20% and 40% of the mass of our sun. It doesn't yet generate its own energy through fusion. Stars like these, which are still cocooned in a dark cloud of dust and gas, have a long way to go before they become fully fledged stars.