Washington. NASA released a spectacular new image of the birth of stars similar to the Sun on Wednesday, showing jets of red gas exploding into the cosmos and incandescent dust, coinciding with the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope.
They come from the closest star-forming region to Earth, 390 light-years away, located in the Rho Ophiuchi gas cloud.
This image, which contains about 50 young stars about the same size as the Sun, “allows us to witness a very brief period of the stellar life cycle with a new clarity,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist.
“Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago,” he added.
On July 12, 2022, the US space agency revealed the first color images of its new space observatory. This marked the beginning of the scientific operations of this technological jewel, located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering through clouds of dust and seeing light from far corners of the universe for the first time,” said NASA chief Bill Nelson. .
“Each new image is a new discovery, allowing scientists around the world to ask and answer questions they couldn’t even dream of before,” he said.
For this first anniversary, NASA plans to review the first year of discoveries during a live video broadcast over the Internet.
infrared
For a year now, James Webb has dazzled astronomers with images of unprecedented precision.
He observed the most distant galaxy ever detected and black holes and measured for the first time the temperature of distant rocky planets similar to Earth, whose atmosphere he began to analyze. Observations of it have given rise to a sea of scientific studies.
One of the main missions of the telescope is to explore the universe. It also examines exoplanets, that is, planets located outside the solar system and will help to better understand the formation and life cycle of stars.
Among the spectacular images that he gave us in October is that of the emblematic “Pillars of Creation”, immense structures of gas and dust full of forming stars, 6,500 light years from Earth, in our galaxy, the Milky Way. .
The observatory cost 10 billion dollars and decades of work. It is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, still in operation, but unlike Hubble, which observes the universe mainly in the visible spectrum, James Webb operates in the infrared.
This allows you to detect much weaker light and therefore see much further.
Since this wavelength is imperceptible to the human eye, the images are “translated” into visible colors.
The region captured by the image released this Wednesday is “completely bleak when viewed with Hubble,” Klaus Pontoppidan explained on Twitter.
James Webb has enough fuel to run for 20 years.
Researchers from all over the world can book observing time with the telescope.
“We have selected an ambitious set of observations for the second year, based on everything we have learned so far,” said Jane Rigby of NASA’s Goddard Space Center. “James Webb’s scientific mission has only just begun.”
#NASA #publishes #image #birth #stars