200,000 light-years away.. NASA publishes an image of stars that may reveal the first phase of the universe

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has released a new image, providing new insights into how stars formed in the early universe more than 10 billion years ago.

The image shows a small group of primary stars that are still in the process of formation, which are more than 200,000 light-years away from Earth, and observing them may reveal how stars form what is observed in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, the group of stars called “NGC 346” is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way, which is interesting to astronomers because it resembles the conditions for the formation of the early universe when Star formation was at its peak.

Astronomers believe that studying this region where the stars are located can help shed light on how the first stars were formed during what is known as the cosmic noon, that is, the beginnings of the universe, which are only two or three billion years after the Big Bang of the universe.

Previous infrared studies of the cluster have focused on protostars five to eight times the mass of our Sun.

Olivia Jones, who works on the Webb telescope team at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Astronomy Technology Center in the UK, said that when stars form they collect gas and dust, and can look like ribbons made up of the surrounding molecular cloud.

This comes as astronomers have detected gas around protostars within the cluster, but Webb’s near-infrared observations mark the first time they have also detected dust in these disks.