A star is being born in a new stellar image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope imaged nebula N79, which is 1,630 light-years wide. It is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way galaxy, almost 200,000 light-years from Earth. In about 2 billion years, the LMC could collide with our home galaxy.
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This image uses orange, yellow, and blue filters to showcase the star nurseries forming new stars. Astronomers are still exploring it. JWST's mid-infrared observation instrument captured images characterizing interstellar atomic hydrogen.
See “Starburst” more clearly
This new image focuses on an area called N79 South (S1). This region consists of her three huge bundles of cold atomic gas called molecular clouds. The bright starburst effect at the center is due to diffraction spikes created as light is collected by the 18 components that make up JWST's primary mirror. These mirrors are grouped into a hexagon, so there are six main diffraction spikes.
“Such patterns are only noticeable around very bright and compact objects, where all the light comes from the same place,” the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a press release. “Most galaxies appear very small to our eyes, but we don't see this pattern because they are dimmer and more spread out than a single star.”
When JWST observes a galaxy that appears smaller, it sees more light with the help of the placement and behavior of these mirrors.
The telescope's mid-infrared instruments also capture longer wavelength light, which this new view uses to showcase N79's glowing gas and dust. Mid-infrared light can reveal what's going on deep within these gas and dust clouds. Light at shorter wavelengths would be scattered or absorbed by the nebula's dust particles.
nebula brothers
N79 is thought to be the younger brother of the Tarantula Nebula, located about 161,000 light-years from Earth. Although the two are similar, astronomers believe N79 is forming stars twice as fast as her in the Tarantula Nebula.
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“Such star-forming regions are of interest to astronomers. Their chemical compositions are similar to those observed when the universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. This is because the chemical composition is similar to that of star-forming regions.'' ESA.
The star-forming regions of our galaxy are not producing stars at the ferocious pace that N79 is. They also have different chemical compositions. JWST is helping astronomers compare and contrast his observations of star formation in N79 with deep observations of distant galaxies in the early universe.
Astronomers also hope to observe disks of planet-forming material surrounding young stars similar to the Sun. Images like this could help us better understand how our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago.
