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Updated: 17 of 2022 12:46 and
Washington [US]17 (ANI): Rice University astronomer Megan Reiter and colleagues ‘dived deep’ in one of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and were rewarded with the discovery of signals from two dozen young stars never seen before at 7,500 km away. from the earth.
The research, published in the December issue of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notice, provides a glimpse of what astronomers will find with near-infrared webcams. The instrument is designed to peer through interstellar dust clouds that previously prevented astronomers from seeing stellar nurseries, especially those that produce stars similar to Earth’s sun.
Reiter, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and co-author from Caltech, the University of Arizona, Queen Mary University of London and the Royal Observatory UK in Edinburgh, Scotland, analyzed part of Webb’s first image of a cosmic slope, a star-forming region within a star cluster known as NGC 3324.
“What Webb is giving us is a picture of how much star formation is happening in a corner of the universe that we’ve probably never seen before,” said Reiter, who led the research. .
Located in the southern constellation of Carina, NGC 3324 is home to several well-known star-forming regions that astronomers have studied for decades. Many details of the area have been obscured by dust in images from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. The infrared webcam is designed to see through the dust in the region and to detect jets of gas and dust from the very young star’s poles.
Reiter and his colleagues focused their attention on a part of NGC 3324 where only a few young stars had previously been found. By analyzing a specific infrared wavelength, 4.7 microns, they detected twenty previously unknown outflows of molecular hydrogen from a young star. They vary in size, but many appear to come from protostars that will eventually grow into low-mass stars like Earth’s sun.
“The results speak volumes about how good the telescope is and how far it can go to even the loneliest corner of the universe,” said Reiter.
In their first 10,000 years, newborn stars gather matter from the gas and dust around them. Most young stars eject some of this material into space in jets fired away from their poles. Dust and gas accumulate in front of the jet, plowing its way through the sagittal cloud like a snowplow. A vital component of the nascent star, molecular hydrogen, is absorbed by these jets and can be seen in Webb’s infrared images.
“Jets like these are signatures of the most exciting parts of the star formation process,” said study co-author Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona. “We only saw them for a short time when the protostar was actively accreting.”
The accretion period of early star formation is very difficult for astronomers to study because it is transient, usually only a few thousand years in the early part of a star’s million years.
Jets like the ones detected in this study, said John Morse, co-author of the Caltech study, “are only visible when you start your deep dive, slicing the data from each of several filters and analyzing each region individually.
“It’s like finding treasure,” said Morse.
Reiter said the size of the Webb Telescope also played a role in the discovery.
“It’s just a big lightweight bucket,” Reiter said. “This allows us to see little things that we might miss with smaller telescopes. It also gives us very good angular resolution. This gives us a level of sharpness that allows us to see relatively small elements, even in distant areas.” Favorite
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