Nasa snaps first-ever images of Milky Way’s hidden ‘space womb’ packed with 500,000 stars – including doomed ‘baby sun’
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope took a stunning first-of-its-kind photo of the Milky Way with magnificent details.
The photo shows a whopping 500,000 stars from our Milky Way galaxy densely packed together with a glittering blue hue.
The JWST is capable of taking photos of space like never before.
Its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument was able to pick up a 50 light-years-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense center.
“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb,” said the observation team’s principal investigator Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, per a press release.
“So, we are seeing lots of features here for the first time
“Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.”
The photo specifically shows the galactic center of the Milky Way which is where new stars form like a space womb.
The star-forming activity makes it a very intense environment as they are stirring up all kinds of movement and spewing gases.
“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,” Professor Jonathan Tan, one of Crowe’s advisors at the University of Virginia said, per the release.
The image shows this activity in action which can be seen as the blue.
Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain also highlighted how vigorous the galactic center is.
“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place,” Fedriani said.
“There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation.”
The JWST has been an amazing tool for getting a better understanding of the universe with its complex imaging capabilities.
Crowe explained the telescope is constantly advancing science.
“Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it,” Crowe said in the release.
“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said.
“Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”
Also in the photo, you can see a star that is 30 times bigger than our Sun and will continue to grow, but unfortunately due to its massive size, it will have a short life and supernova in a few million years, Space reported.
Stars that are similar to our sun can live up to billions of years