01:52 PM
Monday, January 16, 2023
NASA has published a new image taken by the James Webb Telescope, which may help understand how stars formed in the early universe more than 10 billion years ago.
The image shows a small group of stars called NGC 346, more than 200,000 light-years away from Earth.
These stars are located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy close to our own Milky Way. Astronomers believe that studying this region can help shed light on how the first stars formed during “cosmic noon,” just two or three billion years after the Big Bang.
These stars contain lower concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, which astronomers call metals, than the Milky Way.
And since dust grains in space are mostly composed of minerals, scientists expected that there would be small amounts of dust, and that it would be difficult to detect, but new data from Webb reveal the opposite.
Margaret Mixner, an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association and the lead researcher on the research team, said that this huge cluster, which forms stars strongly in its galaxy, provides us with a great opportunity to explore the conditions that existed at the time of the cosmic noon.
The cluster includes primary stars in the form of clouds of gas and dust in space that develop into stars, according to the British Daily Mail website.
