How are stars born? New clues in the heart of the Milky Way: here are the images from the Webb telescope
Dense areas of celestial bodies, forming stars, bright clouds: they could provide important data to researchers on the origins of the universe
How is a star born ? The answer, or some shy detail, may come from one of the latest images captured by the James Webb space telescope , from NASA, the European and Canadian Space Agency. The famous "eye" on the universe has revealed an unprecedented detail to scholars: a particularly dense area of stars in the heart of the Milky Way , called Sagittarius C. Structures never seen before were identified there.
And thanks to the study of these new elements it will perhaps be possible to know the process by which the celestial bodies that have always fascinated man are born. Sagittarius C is a stellar nursery which is located about 300 light-years from the central supermassive black hole of our galaxy , Sagittarius A*. “There has never been infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that we get with Webb, so we are seeing many things for the first time,” comments Samuel Crowe, who leads the research team at American University of Virginia which is handling the case. «We will thus be able to study – he specifies – star formation in this type of environment in a way that was not possible before».
Among the approximately 500 thousand stars in the image there is a cluster of protostars , i.e. stars still in formation, which emit a light so bright that it looks like a bonfire on a dark night. At the center of this young cluster is a particularly massive protostar, already known, which has a mass 30 times greater than that of the Sun. The cloud from which these rising stars emerge is so dense that the light from those behind it cannot reach the telescope lenses, making the area appear less crowded when in fact it is the most densely populated in the image.
Among the objects that have attracted the attention of astronomers the most is a blue colored cloud , the result of energetic photons emitted by young massive stars. Also surprising are the needle-shaped structures present in the cloud itself, which are oriented chaotically in all directions.
(Unioneonline/vf)
