New Delhi, India

As the world celebrated Christmas, the European Space Agency (ESA) shared a stunning image following "Santa's path" through the cosmos.

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Sadly, the image, which was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is just the European Space Agency jumping onto the Christmas bandwagon. However, that doesn't discount the glorious, ethereal beauty of the picture.

"On 25 December 2021, an Ariane 5 rocket followed Santa Claus and launched @esawebb into space. Today, Webb brings what looks like the path left by Santa's sleigh," writes ESA.

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The image which has quite predictably garnered significant attention on social media is actually of the Herbig-Haro objects. In merely 13 hours, the stunning image got more than 12,780 likes, with the numbers rolling up every minute.  

What are Herbig Haro objects?

As per the ESA, "Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars (known as protostars), and are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds."

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"HH 797, which dominates the lower half of this image, is located close to the young open star cluster IC 348, which is located near the eastern edge of the Perseus dark cloud complex. The bright infrared objects in the upper portion of the image are thought to host two further protostars," it adds.

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Furthermore, the space agency details that using ground-based observations, "researchers have previously found that for cold molecular gas associated with HH 797, most of the red-shifted gas (moving away from us) is found to the south (bottom right), while the blue-shifted gas (moving towards us) is to the north (bottom left)."

Awestruck by the glorious display of stars, netizens left comments like "What a magnificence", and "magical", while others pointed out that it looked like a snake or a spaghetti monster.

(With inputs from agencies)