NASA obtains its finest glimpse yet at space's "deepest, coldest ices."

They begin as layers of space made up of tiny bodies of ice before stars become giant glowing bodies of hot gas and planets become viable. And now NASA has the best view of these materials.

"Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has obtained a detailed inventory of the deepest and coldest ice ever measured in a molecular cloud," NASA said in a statement Monday. This is the most comprehensive census yet of ice composition, which can be used to form future generations of stars and planets before it heats up during young star formation.

The count was recorded from the Chameleon I molecular cloud, which is about 500 light-years from Earth and is currently developing dozens of stars. This region is part of the 65 light-year-wide Chameleon Cloud Cluster captured by the Hubble Space Telescope last year.

Using telescopes, astronomers have been able to get a closer look at the 'frozen forms' of various molecules, including carbonyl sulfide, ammonia, methane and methanol. These molecules contain the essential elements (primarily carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur) needed to form planets and stars. These elements and phosphorus are essential for living organisms.

Astronomer Melissa McClure said the results help paint a picture of the "dark chemical phase" of ice formation from interstellar dust particles.

"These observations open new windows on the pathways by which simple and complex molecules essential to building the building blocks of life are formed," he said.

They also discovered for the first time more complex molecules deep in molecular clouds. This suggests that many stars and planets in the clouds studied may have inherited advanced molecules. It also suggests that this is a common post-star-forming event that extends beyond Earth's own solar system.

The findings, published Monday in Nature Astronomy, are part of the James Webb Space Telescope's Ice Age Project to learn more about the molecular components that began forming ice and eventually became life itself. I do it.

"This is the first in a series of spectral images we are taking to see how the ice evolves from its initial synthesis to the comet-forming region in the protoplanetary disk," McClure said. "That tells us which ice mixtures and thus which elements are transported to the surface of an exoplanet or absorbed into the atmosphere of a gas or ice giant planet."