Recently published images taken by the Webb Telescope showed stars “being born” in the constellation Virgo, twenty million light-years from Earth.
The galaxy where these stars were born is called a “deleted” galaxy, after the bright dust bar that appears above the words deleted.
The Webb telescope can see through the dust and gas surrounding stars as they are born, making them a particularly suitable tool for producing images that show the process of star formation. Endgate technical.
The site says the findings are extremely valuable to astronomers for two reasons. First, star formation underlies many areas in astronomy, from the physics of fragile interstellar plasmas to the evolution of entire galaxies. I hope to start a major scientific breakthrough with some of the first data available from the Internet.
The second reason is that Webb’s observations build on other studies using telescopes including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency and the world’s most efficient ground-based observatories.
Webb collected images of 19 nearby star-forming galaxies, which astronomers could then match with Hubble’s catalog of 10,000 galaxies.
These observations span the electromagnetic spectrum and give astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to piece together the details of star formation.
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