The space telescope James Webb took a look at our stellar neighborhood and obtained a never-before-seen image of the heart of the Milky Way. The most powerful observatory in the world, managed by NASA, captured a portion of a region called Sagittarius Clocated in the center of our galaxy, which has exposed features never before seen by astronomers.
Sagittarius C is about 300 light years from the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way. “There has never been infrared data in this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that we get with the James Webb, so we are seeing many features here for the first time,” said the observing team’s principal investigator, Samuel Crowein a release from NASA.
In this image of the heart of the Milky Way, there are about 500 thousand stars of different sizes and ages. And near the center you can see a cluster of protostars: stars that are still forming and gaining mass. The most special is a massive protostar, which has 30 times the mass of our sun. Smaller dark infrared clouds dot the image, looking like dark spaces. That’s where future stars are formed.
“Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this type of environment in a way that was not possible before,” Crowe added. Unlike the Hubble telescope – its older brother and which mainly observes visible light – the James Webb captures infrared light and this is what has allowed it to reveal these cosmic secrets.
The questions behind the photo of James Webb at the heart of the Milky Way
The instrument NIRCam James Webb’s near-infrared camera also captured large-scale emissions of a type of hydrogen gas—identified by the yellow dotted line—surrounding the underside of the dark cloud. Astronomers identified needle-shaped structures in this area, which appear oriented in multiple directions. What are they? They don’t know it, but the team has already started investigating.
“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way, where current theories of star formation can be put to the most rigorous tests,” explained Jonathan Tan, one of Crowe’s advisors at the University of Virginia.
The heart of the Milky Way is about 25,000 light years from our Earth. A light year is the distance that a beam of light travels in one year and is equivalent to 9.46 trillion kilometers. The James Webb has the ability to see remote corners of our universe, like no other instrument until now. He does nothing, he discovered unknown details of a planet that rains sand, located 200 light years away.
But the center of our galaxy is so close that it allows us to study individual stars. It offers scientists the opportunity to gather new information about how these celestial bodies form and how this process depends on the cosmic environment. And answer, for example, whether more massive stars form in the heart of the Milky Way or at the edges of its spiral arms.
«[James] Webb has provided us with a wealth of data on this extreme environment and we are just beginning to delve deeper into it,” he said. Ruben Fedriani, co-investigator of the project at the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Spain. All the questions and answers help piece together the puzzle of how much of our universe originated. And, consequently, life on our Earth.