Washington. the space telescope james webb captured the first images of the Orion nebula, which left astronomers “impressed”, an international research team revealed yesterday.
It is a wall of dense gas and dust resembling a huge winged creature, its maw illuminated by a bright star as it soars through cosmic filaments.
The nebula is located in the constellation Orion, 1,350 light-years from Earth, in an environment similar to the birth of our own solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.
Astronomers are interested in the region to better understand what happened during the first million years of our planetary evolution.
The images were obtained as part of the program Early Release Science and involved more than 100 scientists in 18 countries, with institutions including the French National Center for Scientific Research, as well as the universities of Western Canada and Michigan.
“We are surprised by the impressive images of the Orion nebula,” Els Peeters, an astrophysicist at Universidad Oeste, said in a statement.
“These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the cloud of gas and dust from which they are born,” he added.
Nebulae are often obscured by large amounts of dust that were impossible to see with visible-light telescopes, such as the Hubble, predecessor of James Webb. However, the latter operates mainly in the infrared spectrum, which does penetrate dust.
This allowed the unveiling of several spectacular structures, up to a distance of 40 astronomical units or the size of our solar system.
These include dense filaments of matter, which could spawn new generations of stars, as well as systems consisting of a central protostar surrounded by a disk of dust and gas in which planets form.
“We hope to better understand the entire cycle of star birth,” explained Edwin Bergin, chair of astronomy at the University of Michigan and a member of the international research team.
“In the image, we see this cycle where the first generation of stars radiates material for the next generation. The incredible structures we observe will detail how the feedback loop of star birth occurs in our galaxy and beyond.”
james webb It is the most powerful space telescope ever built, with a 6.5-meter primary mirror made up of 18 gold-coated hexagonal segments and a five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court.
“Massive young stars emit large amounts of ultraviolet radiation directly into the native cloud that still surrounds them, and this changes the physical shape of the cloud as well as its chemical composition. It is not yet known precisely how this works and how it affects the formation of stars and planets,” said Olivier Berné, from the CNRS.
With information from Europa Press
#Astronomers #impressed #images #Orion #Nebula
