This is what the heart of the Milky Way looks like, thanks to James Webb’s fascinating image.

Recently, James Webb Special Telescope Revealed a stunning photo of the heart of the Milky WayFeatures not yet recorded are shown in detail.

You can see part of the dense core of the Earth’s galaxy in this glowing image of azure blues, pinks and purples exposed in new light.

According to NASA, earlier photographs did not provide records with infrared data, which showed the stars found there. A fact It can help “study their formation in this kind of context in a way that was not possible before.”

(You might be interested: Hubble Space Telescope Finds Young Planet Ejecting Its Atmosphere Like a Hiccup).

“The region doesn’t have infrared data with the resolution and sensitivity that we get with the web, so we’re seeing many features here for the first time,” said Samuel Grove, a senior member of the observatory team. University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the institute said in a statement.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, a giant spiral that rotates once every 200 million years. It is made up of at least 100 billion stars and dust and gas. And it’s so big that it takes 100,000 years to cross it from one side to the other.

According to the information portal of the European Space Agency, ESA, It was very difficult to see the center of it The presence of clouds made up of earlier chemical elements prevented the view of any equipment trying to photograph it.

(Also read: ‘Eye of the Sahara’: Everything you need to know about the mysterious structure discovered from space).

Apparently, with James Webb’s new record In the Heart of the Galaxy , this may have changed, Reveals approximately 500,000 stars in formation.

“The galactic center is the most intense environment of our Milky Way. Current theories of star formation may be subjected to more rigorous tests” says Professor Jonathan Tan, Crowe’s advisor at the University of Virginia for NASA.

Protostars and the infrared

Thanks to NIRCam technology, a web-forming near-infrared camera, scientists have been able to record clusters of protostars that are still forming and gaining mass.

At the center of this space phenomenon “First known massive protostar discovered, 30 times more massive than our Sun”It reveals intriguing colors and possible star systems.

“Webb’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) instrument captured large amounts of emission from ionized hydrogen around the base of the dark cloud, Shown in cyan in the figure, this is the result of energetic photons emitted by massive young starsBut the sheer size of the region shown by the web is surprising and deserves further investigation,” Crowe says.

(Also Read: James Webb Telescope Captures Extraordinary Image Of Collision Of Two Spiral Galaxies).

The discovery affects progress and research into the formation and evolution of stars that NASA and its team have been studying since the telescope’s launch in 2021.

“The image of the web is amazing, and the science we get from it is even better. Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their cores. So understanding them better is like knowing the history of the origin of much of the universe,” the consultant concluded in the statement.

Natalia Gomez Barra

Digital Scope Editorial

Time

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