The James Webb Space Telescope is investigating one of the most dynamic star-forming regions of nearby galaxies, NGC 346, where significant amounts of dust have been detected, something astronomers did not expect.
NCG 346 is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a “dwarf galaxy” near the Milky Way that contains lower concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium called metals.
As dust grains in space are mostly made of “metals”, scientists expected to find only small amounts of dust that would be difficult to detect, but “new data” from the Webb telescope “reveals the opposite”.
The astronomers explored that region because “the conditions and amount of metals within the SMC resemble those observed in galaxies billions of years ago,” during a time in the history of the Universe known as “cosmic noon,” when the star formation was in full formation.
As announced Wednesday on the James Webb Space Telescope website, some 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, galaxies were forming stars at breakneck rates and “the star-forming fireworks that occurred are still giving shapes the galaxies we see around us.
“Although NGC 346 is now the only massive star-forming cluster in its galaxy, it offers us a great opportunity to investigate the conditions that existed at ‘cosmic noon,'” said Margaret Meixner, astronomer and principal investigator on the team of scientists.
Observing these “protostars” in the process of formation allows researchers to know if the star formation process in the SMC is different from what we observe in the Milky Way itself.
As stars form, they “accumulate gas and dust that can appear as ribbons in Webb images” of the surrounding molecular cloud.
“With Webb, we can investigate lighter-weight protostars, as small as a tenth the size of our Sun” and find out if their formation process “is affected by lower metal content,” said Olivia Jones of the Center for Astronomical Technology. UK.
For Guido De Marchi, from the European Space Agency (ESA), “the basic components are being observed not only of stars, but also potentially of planets.”
The James Webb, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space, is a $10 billion project and named after a former NASA administrator, which was sent into space in December as a European-made rocket. It is in orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
The astronomers hope with James Webb to obtain more data on the beginnings of the Universe, including the birth of the first galaxies and stars, but also on the formation of the planets.
Source: TSF
