UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Over 50,000 submissions are made for images on U.S. stamps every year, and out of those, about 40 are turned into real stamps. For Kevin Luhman, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, seeing an image he took with the James Webb Space Telescope on a U.S. stamp has become a reality.
In 2022, Luhman took images of a nebula — a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where stars often form — in the Perseus constellation. His goal was to use these images to detect brown dwarfs — starlike objects that are not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion at their cores — at a much smaller mass than had been seen before. Now, three years later, one of the images taken during his research is being used on a U.S. stamp, specifically with priority express mail.
Luhman spoke about his research and how he came across this image, as well as his reaction to finding out that it would be used on a stamp this year, in the Q&A below.
**Q: How did you find out that your James Webb Space Telescope image would be used on one of the U.S. stamps this year, and what was your reaction?**
**Luhman:** I had Googled IC348, the name of this cluster of stars, to see if there were any new results on the cluster or if there was any new discussion of the research that I had done with it using the James Webb Space Telescope. I like to keep up to date on anything new that people have talked about with the cluster. By doing that, I stumbled across the press release from the post office in December where they announced these new stamps. I was delighted — it’s not something that happens every day, so I was very surprised by it as well.
**Q: What were you working on when you took this image?**
**Luhman:** I was researching the nebula in the Perseus constellation, which contains a few hundred newborn stars. By using Webb, we were able to identify three new brown dwarfs in that cluster that extend down to about three or four times the mass of Jupiter, which is very small in mass. This makes the smallest one the smallest brown dwarf that has been found anywhere. The aspects of that image that are visually appealing are the colors and the extended emission from the nebula itself. What’s ironic to me is that the colorful emission is an obstacle because it makes it more difficult to detect what I’m after scientifically, which is the brown dwarfs. So, to me, it’s funny that the aspect of the image that is an obstacle to me is what is visually appealing and was brought to the attention of the post office.
**Q: Have you had other images used in similar ways?**
**Luhman:** More than 20 years ago, I published images from the Hubble Space Telescope of the Orion Nebula, in which we were doing the same thing — trying to detect brown dwarfs. The Orion Nebula is a very popular topic in terms of photography because of its visual appeal. The Hubble images that we made for Orion were very visually appealing, so they’ve been distributed over the internet quite a few times.
**Q: What is one question you are researching?**
**Luhman:** What are the smallest star-like bodies? Recently, I’ve been using the Webb Telescope to search for brown dwarfs of very small masses in nearby clouds of gas and dust that contain new stars. The reason for doing this is that when brown dwarfs are born, they are relatively bright and easy to see. But since they don’t fuse hydrogen, they get fainter and fainter and cooler and cooler as they get older. So, if I want to identify them at very small masses, the best bet is to look at them when they are young, like in these nebulae of gas and dust in which newborn stars are present.
**Q: What are you finding?**
**Luhman:** We normally think of stars like the sun and planets as very different in terms of masses and temperatures. But brown dwarfs, which seem to be born like stars, have masses and temperatures that overlap with those of giant planets. Over time, we are finding brown dwarfs at smaller masses and lower temperatures, farther into the regime of giant planets. Now, we are finding brown dwarfs, or very tiny "suns,” that are almost as small as Jupiter. This research allows us to better understand the similarities and differences in how stars and planets are born.