The James Webb Space Telescope recently unveiled an extraordinary image of the dense center of the Milky Way. It’s an incredibly chaotic sector of the universe, as described by NASA this Monday.
The image spotlights Sagittarius C, a region about 300 light years away from the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A, located at the Milky Way’s central core. This detailed image reveals approximately 500,000 stars, including a cluster of protostars that are still in the process of formation. The protostars, currently in the phase of mass accumulation, emit an intense glow, akin to a blazing bonfire amidst an infrared-dark cloud, according to NASA.
Samuel Crowe, the principal investigator for the observation team, expressed his excitement, stating, “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. 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.”
So, what exactly does this new James Webb image entail?
One of the baby stars captured in the image is a protostar that surpasses 30 times the mass of the sun. Interestingly, a dense cloud impedes light from reaching the telescope, making the space appear less crowded than its actual state.
Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, highlighted the presence of magnetized gas clouds in the space and the subsequent impact of star formations on the surrounding gas. Fedriani noted, “There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation.” Fascinatingly, a previously undisclosed region of ionized hydrogen gas envelops the dense dust cloud in the image, serving as an intriguing subject for NASA’s future investigation.
“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,” Crowe articulated.
Now, what exactly do scientists anticipate learning from this space region?
Located approximately 25,000 light years from Earth, the galactic center provides an unparalleled proximity for astronomers to examine individual stars. This proximity, along with the advanced capabilities of the Webb telescope, will grant scientists access to unprecedented insights on star formation.
“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,” commented Jonathan Tan, a professor at the University of Virginia’s astronomy department and one of Crowe’s advisors.
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