SPACE — The James Webb Telescope captured a new image of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This image helps astronomers study how stars form in greater detail than ever before.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, has a powerful camera and very sensitive instruments. Its instruments allow for objects in space that older technologies could not capture.
Using a technique called infrared astronomy, the telescope has now imaged a region of the galaxy, called Sagittarius C. This region is covered in around 500,000 stars. There are several other unknown features that the researchers will now analyze in more detail.
Even though Sagittarius C is located 25,000 light years from Earth, observations with the $10 billion telescope are close enough to study each star individually.
“There has never been infrared data in this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that we got with Webb, so we are seeing many features here for the first time,” said Samuel Crowe, principal investigator of the observation team at the University of Virginia, as reported by The National News.
The galactic center is the most extreme environment in the Milky Way. Further understanding of this will hopefully help astronomers test their theories about star formation.
The new images also reveal a group of protostars (stars that are still forming). However, the cloud from which the protostar emerged was so dense that light from the cluster could not reach the Webb telescope.
NASA said that even though the image doesn’t look too busy, this area is one of the most congested areas.
The telescope data also captured large amounts of ionized hydrogen emission surrounding the lower side of the cloud. “The center of the galaxy is a busy and tumultuous place,” said Ruben Fedriani, one of the project researchers at the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Spain.
There are clouds of turbulent, magnetized gas that form stars. This impacts the surrounding gas with wind currents, jets, and radiation.
Through these observations, researchers will also be able to study how star formation in the center of the galaxy depends on the cosmic environment compared to other regions of the galaxy.
2023-11-22 03:02:00
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