NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia)
- NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a stunning image near the heart of the Milky Way.
- The chaotic region appears brilliantly colorful, glittering with the light of 500,000 stars.
- JWST can view infrared light and allows scientists to observe never-before-seen features.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a colorful, glittering image of a chaotic region near the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
At the center of the Milky Way, lies a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole that violently warps the very space-time around it, according to research recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Nearby are, "turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars," said Rubén Fedriani of the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, in a NASA press release.
That's exactly what you're seeing in this stunning new JWST image that NASA released on Monday. The image is of the star-forming region called Sagittarius C.
The perfect place to study stars
Sagittarius C lives only 300 light-years away from the black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is basically right next door compared to Earth, which is located 25,000 light-years away, per NASA.
It's the perfect place for astronomers to study how a generic clump of gas can burst to life in the form of a star that then lives for millions to billions of years.
"The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test," said Jonathan Tan, a professor at the University of Virginia, in the press release.
Revealing never-before-seen objects in our galaxy
Digging into the JWST image and its wealth of data, astronomers discovered something they'd never seen before. Check out the bright pink cluster circled in orange near the center of the annotated image below:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Samuel Crowe (UVA)
The cluster is what's called a protostar cluster. Protostars are the early stages of a star. They're compact clumps of gas that just haven't generated enough heat and pressure in their cores, yet, to qualify as a star.
Protostars are usually surrounded by dust, which can make them difficult to observe with visible light, according to Las Cumbres Observatory.
However, JWST captures infrared light that can see through the dust, making it an ideal instrument for studying protostars. And the powerful space telescope did not disappoint in its new image.
In the center of the cluster, JWST revealed a giant protostar 30 times the mass of our sun that astronomers had never seen before, per NASA.
Eventually, this enormous protostar will form into a massive star many times more massive than our sun. Massive stars like this don't have very long to live because they burn through their life's fuel very quickly.
"In a few million years' time, the ultra-massive object will explode as a supernova, in contrast to stars with masses similar to our sun's that can survive for billions of years," journalist Keith Cooper wr
dima_zel/Getty Images
Scientists estimate there are 500,000 stars in the new image.
The bright blue section of the photo is a huge emission of ionized hydrogen that results from young massive stars spewing out energetic photons, NASA said.
Within the wisps of blue are needle-like structures that shoot out in all directions without rhyme or reason, according to the agency.
The sheer size of the cyan-colored region was somewhat of a surprise to scientists, who need to investigate further, NASA said.
"Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it," Fedriani said in the press release.