NASA’s James Webb captures our Milky Way in ‘unprecedented detail’: New image shows never-before-seen stars and chaotic clouds in the galactic center

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy in unprecedented detail.

The stunning image shows more than 50,000 stars and chaotic clouds at the center of the galaxy, about 300 light-years from a supermassive black hole and 25,000 light-years from Earth.

While astronomers have long known about these features, the new image could finally answer the mysteries of this extreme environment.

One, in particular, is how a star-forming region called Sagittarius C still manages to give birth to a new, massive, self-luminous celestial body while exposed to the Sun’s radiation.

“There has never been any infrared data in this region at the level of resolution and sensitivity that we get with Webb, so we’re seeing a lot of features here for the first time,” said the observing team’s principal investigator, Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. .

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.

The stunning image was captured using JWST’s infrared camera, NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera).

This instrument detects light from the first stars and galaxies in the process of formation, star clusters in nearby galaxies, and young stars in objects in the Milky Way and the Kuiper Belt.

Among the roughly 50,000 stars is a group of protostars, stars that are still forming, gaining mass, and emitting streams that scientists say glow like fire against the dark cloud.

The team discovered a previously unknown protostar with a mass 30 times the mass of our Sun.

“The cloud from which the protostars emerge is so dense that light from the stars behind them cannot reach the Webb, making it appear less crowded when in fact it is one of the densest regions in the image,” the team shared in a briefing.

“The image is dotted with small dark infrared clouds, looking like holes in a star field. This is where the stars of the future are forming.

JWST’s NIRCam also captured emissions outside the luminous star-forming region, which Crowe said are emanating from young, massive stars.

“The center of the galaxy is a crowded, turbulent place,” said Rubén Fedriani, a co-researcher on the project at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain. “There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that form stars, which then influence the surrounding gas with their flowing winds, jets and radiation.”

“Webb has provided us with a wealth of data about this extreme environment, and we’re just starting to dig into it.”

The team also said that the James Webb Space Telescope is powerful enough to study individual stars at the center of the galaxy, allowing scientists to learn how they form and how the environment affects that formation.

The picture can answer questions such as: Do larger stars form in the center of the Milky Way, as opposed to the edges of its spiral arms?

“The image Webb took is amazing, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said.

“Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”