The play of darkness and light in our galaxy’s crowded core is put on display like never before by the James Webb Space Telescope. A bright field
The play of darkness and light in our galaxy’s crowded core is put on display like never before by the James Webb Space Telescope.
A bright field of gas sweeps around the edge of a dark, dense cloud where young stars are bursting out to take their place in the universe. They join an estimated 500,000 other stars in the scene, of various ages, sizes, and colors. It’s the hub of our Milky Way galaxy, a city center at rush hour, making our solar system’s calm corner a frontier outpost by comparison, reported NASA.
Discover the new features –and mysteries– NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed with its unprecedented infrared-light view of the chaotic region, and what it means for astronomy.
The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, reports NASA.
“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” said the observation team’s principal investigator Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously”.
“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,” added professor Jonathan Tan, one of Crowe’s advisors at the University of Virginia, reports NASA.
Amid the estimated 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars –stars that are still forming and gaining mass– producing outflows that glow like a bonfire in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. At the heart of this young cluster is a previously known, massive protostar over 30 times the mass of our Sun.
The cloud the protostars are emerging from is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach Webb, making it appear less crowded when in fact it is one of the most densely packed areas of the image. Smaller infrared-dark clouds dot the image, looking like holes in the starfield. That’s where future stars are forming, reports NASA.
“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” said Ruben Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia in Spain. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it”.
Around 25,000 light-years from Earth, the galactic center is close enough to study individual stars with the Webb telescope, allowing astronomers to gather unprecedented information on how stars form, and how this process may depend on the cosmic environment, especially compared to other regions of the galaxy. For example, are more massive stars formed in the center of the Milky Way, as opposed to the edges of its spiral arms?, reports NASA.
“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe”, as reported by NASA.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory.
All Credit To: NASA, ESA, CSA
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