The James Webb Space Telescope revealed this Tuesday sublime images of the Tarantula Nebula, a region of the cosmos where stars are born at a frantic rate, and whose images will deepen scientific knowledge of star formation.
Nicknamed for the shape of its gas and dust clouds, the Tarantula Nebula is “only 161,000 light-years away,” NASA said in a statement.
Although this nebula has long been a prime target for scientists studying the process of star formation, these images are helping to reveal new details, including thousands of young stars previously invisible to the eyes of previous telescopes.
new discoveries
Various scientific instruments aboard the James Webb were used to capture images of the nebula at different wavelengths. In the center of the image taken by the NIRCam instrument, which operates in the near infrared, is a group of very bright young blue stars.
Another instrument, NIRSpec, allowed him to make out a star that had just emerged from its plume of dust, while keeping a cloud around it, a stage in its formation that could not have been observed without the incredible skills of James Webb. Researchers previously thought that this star was actually older and at a more advanced stage.
“Star-forming regions within our Milky Way Galaxy do not produce stars at the same breakneck rate as the Tarantula Nebula and have different chemical compositions,” NASA explained.
Therefore, its own chemical composition is of great interest to researchers, because it is similar to the regions where stars formed when the cosmos was only a few billion years old, when star formation was most important.
Launched into space last Christmas and fully operational for just a few months, the James Webb Telescope makes its observations 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. According to the US space agency, this piece of engineering “just begins to rewrite the history of stellar creation.”
Source: BFM TV
