the space telescope James Webb today celebrated its first year of science with a spectacular new image: a close-up of the birth of stars similar to the Sun. To celebrate this “successful first year” of WebbNASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have released the image of a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex.
The new image of Webb released today shows the closest star-forming region to us. Its proximity to 390 light-years allows for a highly detailed foreground, with no foreground stars in intervening space, informs the ESA in a note.
The picture of Webb it shows a region containing about 50 young stars, all of them similar in mass to the Sun, or smaller. The darkest regions are the densest, where thick dust shrouds forming protostars. Huge bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen, depicted in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally across the top third and vertically across the right side. These jets occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting a pair of opposing jets into space like a newborn stretching its arms out into the world for the first time. By contrast, the S1 star has carved out a glowing dust cave in the lower half of the image. This is the only star in the image that is significantly more massive than the Sun.
“The image of Rho Ophiuchi obtained by Webb it allows us to witness with new clarity a very brief period in the life cycle of stars. Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another star’s history,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, who served as project scientist. Webb at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, from before the telescope’s launch and through its first year of operations.
Some stars in the image show telltale shadows that indicate protoplanetary disks: potential future planetary systems in the making.
“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from far corners of the universe for the first time.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.. For Nelson, “each new image is a new discovery, allowing scientists around the world to ask and answer questions they could never dream of before.”
Today, Wednesday, marks one year since the US space agency NASA released to the scientific community and public opinion the first images of the Webb, on July 12, 2022. On that occasion and in a live broadcast, snapshots of the Carina nebula and the Southern Ring were shown, in addition to Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies, four of which interact with each other . The first spectrographic data corresponding to the exoplanet WASP-96 b, located 1,150 light-years from Earth, were also released, and the day before, at an event attended by US President Joe Biden, the cluster of galaxies SMACS 0732 as it was 4.6 billion years ago.
He James Webb, which was launched on December 25, 2021 and is located 1.5 million kilometers away, it is not only the largest and most advanced telescope in space, but also has opened a new era in astronomy and focuses on the study of the early universe, the evolution of galaxies, the life cycle of stars, and the existence and composition of other worlds. The collaboration of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian (CSA) has made this telescope a reality.
The most relevant discovery of the NASA space telescope, in its first year of operation, have been the “little red dots”, some enigmatic galaxies, which remind us that exploring the universe is discovering phenomena that are beyond current knowledge.
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