Published by the US Space AgencyNASAOn Monday, new images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope revealed features and secrets about the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The telescope observes the universe using infrared rays, which were previously invisible to the human eye, and this time captured amazing images that help astronomers discover more details about the origin of the universe.
Scientists used the telescope to look at an active star-forming region located about 300 light-years from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.
A light-year is the distance a light ray travels in one year, a unit of measurement used for large and very long distances, and is equal to 9.46 trillion kilometers.
“The picture captured by Webb is amazing, and the information we get from it is even more important,” lead researcher and student Samuel Crowe of the University of Virginia said in a statement.CNN“.
“Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their cores, so understanding them better is like knowing the origin story of much of the universe,” he added.
Studying the center of the Milky Way using the Webb telescope can provide insight into the number of stars forming there.
“There’s no infrared data in this region at the resolution level we’ve got through the web, so we’re seeing a lot of features here for the first time,” Crowe explained.
“The web reveals an incredible level of detail that allows us to study star formation in this type of environment in a way that was previously impossible,” he added.
The image shows 500,000 twinkling stars, all of which vary in size and age, including a group of protostars, or dense dust and gas, that are still growing into full stars, with a giant protostar at the center of the group 30 times the mass of the Sun.
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