This is what the heart of the Milky Way looks like thanks to this stunning image taken by James Webb

Most recently, the James Webb Telescope It revealed a stunning image of the heart of the Milky WayWhere properties that have not yet been registered are presented in detail.

In the image you can see flashes of sky blue, pink and violet that reveal part of the Earth’s galaxy’s dense core in new light.

According to NASA, previously captured images did not produce records containing infrared data that showed the stars located there quite clearly. fact that It could help “study their formation in this type of environment in a way that was not possible before.”

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“There has never been infrared data in this region at the level of resolution and sensitivity that we get with Webb, so we see many features here for the first time,” said senior member of the observing team, Samuel Crowe, a student at Harvard University. University of Virginia at Charlottesville, in a statement by the entity.

The Milky Way Galaxy is a spiral galaxy, with a huge spiral that rotates once every 200 million years. It is made up of at least 100 billion stars, as well as dust and gas. It is so large that it would take 100,000 years to cross it from one side to the other.

According to the information portal of the European Space Agency (ESA). Seeing the center of it was very difficult, The presence of clouds composed of the previous chemical elements obscured the vision of any device that attempted to photograph them.

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Apparently, with James Webb’s new recording In the Heart of the Galaxy, that was going to change, Detecting nearly 500,000 stars in formation.

“The Galactic Center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way Galaxy, Where current theories of star formation can be put to the most stringent tests“says Professor Jonathan Tan, Crowe’s advisor at the University of Virginia to NASA.

Protostars and infrared rays

Thanks to NIRCam, the near-infrared camera that makes up Webb, scientists were able to record a population of protostars, objects that are still forming and gaining mass.

At the heart of this space phenomenon “A previously known massive protostar has been found, with a mass more than 30 times the mass of our Sun.”Which reveals mysterious colors and possible star formations.

“Webb’s NIRCam (near infrared camera) instrument also captured widespread emissions from ionized hydrogen surrounding the underside of the dark cloud, Appearing in cyan color in the image, this is the result of energetic photons emitted by young, massive stars“But the sheer extent of the region shown by Webb is a surprise that deserves further investigation,” says Crowe.

(Read also: The James Webb Telescope captures an unusual image of the collision of two spiral galaxies.)

This discovery affects progress and research related to the creation and development of stars that NASA and its team have been studying since implementing the telescope in space in 2021.

“Webb’s picture is amazing, and the science we’ll get from it is even better. Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores. “So understanding it better is like knowing the history of the origin of much of the universe.”

Natalia Gomez Parra

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