 Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast. Today's picture for January 15th of 2024 is titled Star Cluster IC348 from Web. So, what do we see here? Now, this is the Star Cluster known by the catalog designation of IC348. Now, in this image we're seeing what was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope looking at this in detail and seeing a lot of dust there. And you can see a lot of the dust filaments scattered around this image. However, we can also see a lot of the stars now as well. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope observes in the longer wavelengths of visible and in the infrared. And the infrared allows us to penetrate through some of the dust and to see things that would otherwise not be seen in ordinary visible light that we're used to looking at. So in this infrared image we can also see some stars that glow brighter when we look at them in the infrared than when we look at them in the visible. That means they're very cool objects. They're emitting most of their light in the longer wavelength infrared portion of the spectrum. Now, what would these be? What would do this? Stars emit most of their light in the visible spectrum. They're much hotter objects. So these are cooler objects than stars, but not as cool as a planet. And they're what we call a brown dwarf star. These are more massive than Jupiter. They're significantly more massive than Jupiter, but less massive than is needed to be a star. So they are kind of in between the star and the planet phase if we look at the different sizes of objects. Very massive objects like this are stars and can be very massive stars or very low mass stars. And we can have very small objects which will orbit these stars, which of course we call planets. Now in between we get the brown dwarfs and those are very interesting cool objects that are kind of that gap between the stars, that minimum mass of a star that you need in order to ignite nuclear reactions. That's what we need to be a star. And the lower mass planets which are often found orbiting stars. So here we're actually seeing some of those and some of those young brown dwarfs which are forming within this region as well. So it's helping us to better understand the different types of stars that form and the different masses at which these objects form. So are we forming a lot more of these brown dwarfs than we may have thought previously? So there are a lot of brown dwarfs in here including just freestanding ones. Now these would be very hard to see otherwise because they are very faint objects. They don't emit a lot of light of any type. So they're hard to see no matter what and that makes them important to look for in our understanding of how stars form. So that was our picture of the day for January 15th of 2024. It was titled Star Cluster IC348 from Web. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be almost Orion. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.