Milky Way
The Milky Way has been known to people since ancient times. Back in 1610, Galileo Galilei discovered that the diffuse light of the Milky Way band was created by a large number of dim stars.
The first attempt to determine the size and shape of our galaxy was made by William Herschel in 1784-1785, and Edwin Gubble in 1924-1925 was able to prove that the Universe is not limited to it.
Contemporaries confirmed that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy in which our Solar system is located. Most of the stars in this galaxy are concentrated in the so-called galactic disk with spiral arms.
The Milky Way is the second in the group in size and number of stars after the Andromeda Galaxy, but the masses of the two galaxies are of the same order.
Uniqueness of photography
The James Webb Space Telescope recently captured unique images of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail.
Thanks to its infrared capabilities, it allowed astronomers to peer through gas and dust into the “heart” of the Milky Way.
We are talking about a hitherto mysterious star formation region called Sagittarius C (Sgr C). It is located approximately 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.
The center of our galaxy (photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/S.Crowe)
According to student and observing team leader Samuel Crowe, “there has never been any infrared data from this region with this level of resolution and sensitivity.”
He added that the unique telescope “reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in environments and in ways that were previously impossible.”
Professor Jonathan Tan clarified that “the central part is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy”, because there all current theories of star formation can be subjected to “the strictest test.”
What can be seen in the photo
Among the approximately 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars. They are still forming and gaining mass. At the same time, they “produce luminous streams,” like a fire in the middle of an infrared-dark cloud.
At the center of this young cluster is a known and previously massive protostar, with a mass 30 times the mass of our Sun. However, the cloud from which the protostars emerge is so dense that light from the stars behind does not reach the telescope.
The space telescope’s special instrument called NIRCam (near-infrared camera) also captured large-scale emission from ionized hydrogen surrounding the underside of the dark cloud shown in the blue image.
Components of the Milky Way (photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/S.Crowe)
“The center of the Galaxy is a crowded, turbulent place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that form stars, which then influence the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets and radiation,” said researcher Ruben Fedriani.
According to him, scientists have received a huge “mass of data about this extreme environment” and are just beginning to explore it.
“Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of most of the Universe,” Crowe concluded.
James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an American orbiting infrared space telescope.
It is designed for a wide range of observations in astronomy and cosmology. We are talking, in particular, about observations of the most distant objects and events in the Universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.
Construction of the telescope (photo: NASA/Chris Gunn)
This telescope became the successor to the Gubble Telescope as NASA’s premier astrophysics mission. It was launched on December 25, 2021.
At that time, it was the largest, most expensive and sensitive optical and infrared space telescope in human history.
The project is carried out through international cooperation of 17 countries (led by NASA).
It was named after the second head of NASA, James Webb, who led the agency until 1968.
