A recent image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a region of our galaxy’s dense core in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features that astronomers have yet to explain.
A star-forming region called Sagittarius C (Sgr C) is located about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, reports a separate report from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the agency. American Space Agency NASA.
“There is no infrared data in this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that we get with the web, so we are seeing many features here for the first time,” summarizes researcher Samuel Crowe of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
The galactic center is the most intense environment in our Milky Way, and “current theories of star formation may be put to their most rigorous test,” says Jonathan Tan of the same academic center.
To get this snapshot, the researchers used data from Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam).
Among the estimated 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars — still forming and gaining mass — producing a fiery glow amid a dark infrared cloud.
At the center of this young cluster is a massive protostar with a mass 30 times that of our Sun.
The image is dotted with small dark clouds in the infrared that look like holes in the star field; That’s where future stars are born.
The instrument captured large amounts of emission from ionized hydrogen around the base of the dark cloud, shown in cyan in the image.
Typically, this is the result of energetic photons emitted by young massive stars, but the large fraction Webb showed is a surprise that deserves further investigation.
Another feature of the region that scientists plan to study further is the needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen, which look “messy” in multiple directions.
