Thousands of stars that shine illuminating the first shot of the telescope
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON – The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured the icon “Pillars of Creation“, a huge structure of gas and dust filled with stars, the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said Wednesday (10/19/2022), and the picture is as great as one might expect.
The twinkle of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope’s first frame of the gigantic gold, copper and brown column that stands at the center of the cosmos. At the ends of some of the pillars there were spots as bright as lava.
“These are ejections from stars that are still forming,” they said only a few hundred thousand years NASA in a statement, quoted by Japan today, Thursday (10/20/2022).
“These young stars periodically fire supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, such as these thick pillars,” the US space agency added.
The “Pillars of Creation” are located 6,500 light years from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of our Milky Way. The pillars were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which first captured them in 1995 and then again in 2014. But thanks to Webb’s infrared capabilities, the new telescopes, launched into space less than a year ago, they can peer through the opacity of the pillars. , revealing many new stars that are forming.
“By popular demand, we had to make Pillars of Creation” with Webb, Klaus Pontoppidan, head of the science program at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told Wednesday (10/19/2022) to Twitter.
STScl operates Webb from Baltimore, Maryland. “There are so many stars!” Pontoppidan added. NASA astrophysics Amber Straughn summed up: “The universe is beautiful!” she wrote to us Twitter.
The image, which covers an area of about eight light-years, was taken by Webb’s main NIRCam imager, which captures near-infrared wavelengths, invisible to the human eye.
The colors of the images have been “translated” into visible light. According to NASA, the new image will help researchers modify their star formation pattern by identifying the number of newly formed stars much more accurately, along with the amount of gas and dust in the region.
In operation since July, the Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built and has released an unprecedented amount of data. Scientists hope this will mark a new era of discovery.
One of the primary goals of the $ 10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another important research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside the Earth’s solar system.
