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21.11.2023 17:57, Pavel Kotov
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back an impressively beautiful image regions from the center of our Milky Way galaxy – the spacecraft’s instruments captured the star-forming region Sagittarius C.
Image source: webbtelescope.org
This region is about 300 light-years from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy and more than 25,000 light-years from Earth. This region contains more than 500 thousand stars and several clusters of protostars that are still forming and gaining mass. The center of the galaxy is “the most extreme environment” in it, explained University of Virginia professor Jonathan Tan; Until now, astronomers have not had images of this area in such detail and at such resolution.
At the center of this region is a massive protostar with a mass of 30 solar masses – it blocks the light behind it, making its surroundings appear less “populated”. The NIRCam camera also recorded a large-scale emission of ionized hydrogen – this is the blue area at the bottom of the image. This effect likely occurs because young, massive stars emit high-energy photons, but the size of this region was a surprise to scientists.
The head of the research team, Samuel Crowe, explained that studying this and future images will help scientists understand the nature of massive stars, and this is akin to “studying the origin of most of the universe».
