The most powerful telescope to ever be aimed at the stars is continuing to reveal stunning new details about outer space, with the most recent image showcasing the dense centre of our galaxy.
NASA released an image snapped by the James Webb Telescope on Monday which shows the centre of our galaxy in never-before-seen detail, including a star-forming region around 300 light years away from the Milky Way’s central black hole.
“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,†Samuel Crowe, the observation team’s principal investigator and an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.â€
The region of our galaxy in the image is called Sagittarius C, and contains an estimated 500,000 stars. Researchers characterize it as a factory for new stars, meaning that it could hold answers for some of the ongoing questions experts have.
“The galactic centre is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,†Jonathan Tan, a professor at the University of Virginia and one of Crowe’s advisers, said in the release.
The dense clouds of gas and dust where high-mass stars form are hard to penetrate with NASA instruments, appearing often in images as a dark blob on the sky that obscures both the stars inside it and beyond it. These are called infrared-dark clouds, meaning that they block even some wavelengths of infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes and invaluable to researchers.
Although even Webb can’t fully see into these clouds, the image released this week provides insights into Sagittarius C that weren’t possible before.
To the untrained eye, the main thing the photo reveals is the beauty of space—it features ghostly clouds of cyan and pink, layered over and under countless shining stars, with ribbons of black looping through.
But astronomers can see so much more.
The darkest part of the image, where there appear to be fewer stars towards the top, is actually an infrared-dark cloud, which only appears to contain fewer stars because it is so densely packed that it is blocking the light from stars beyond it.
The cyan-coloured patches in the image below the infrared-dark cloud are large-scale emissions of ionized hydrogen. This is often the result of photons being emitted by newly formed stars, but the sheer size of this section has surprised researchers. Within this part of the image are also repeated “needle-like†spikes of cyan that , a pattern that astronomers are hoping to investigate further.
“The galactic centre is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,†Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto AstrofÃsica de AndalucÃa in Spain, said in the release. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.â€
The image also shows a massive protostar more than 30 times the mass of our Sun, which is emerging from the infrared-dark cloud. The entire region is around 25,000 light-years away from Earth, but still close enough to us for astronomers to study individual stars, according to the release.
“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,†Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.â€
This Monday, Sept. 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (NDTR), a federal statutory holiday and day of remembrance for the Indigenous children who never came home from Canadian residential schools, as well as those who survived them.
British Columbia saw a rare unanimous vote in its legislature in October 2019, when members passed a law adopting the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, setting out standards including free, prior and informed consent for actions affecting them.
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The East Coast Ukrainian Festival kicked off at Pier 21 in Halifax on Saturday, celebrating Ukrainian culture and traditions.
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Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service crews believe a candle caused a major house fire in the city’s William Whyte neighbourhood Sunday afternoon.
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The fourth and final walk in memory of Megan Gallagher drew around one hundred people in Saskatoon on Sunday.
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A crash between a car and motorcycle closed a portion of Oxford St. in downtown London for several hours on Sunday.
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A pedestrian has died after reportedly getting struck by an OPP cruiser in Bala early Sunday morning.
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Two and a half years after losing her best friend and first love to suicide, Brooke Ford shared her story of grief and resilience at the CMHA Windsor-Essex Suicide Awareness Walk.
The BSI aims to elevate Black academic excellence, promoting scholarship, mentorship, and cultural knowledge.
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Bullet casings recovered from the scene of a B.C. woman’s murder 30 years ago will be retested for DNA after the province’s highest court ruled it is “in the interests of justice†to do so in support of an ongoing appeal.
The fertility rate in Canda reached an all-time low in 2023, and the lowest rate was recorded in British Columbia, according to new data from Statistics Canada.
New Democrat Leader David Eby, speaking before his largest crowd of the provincial election campaign, says he's making a tax relief election promise that will benefit more than 90 per cent of people in British Columbia.
Fire crews in Vernon, B.C., responded to a large house fire early Saturday morning.
A pair of runaway pigs are in the custody of an animal sanctuary in the Okanagan after evading police and volunteers for hours earlier this week.
The Red Bridge, a historic landmark in Kamloops, B.C., was completely destroyed by fire early Thursday morning.
The sentencing for three men convicted of helping lead and coordinate the COVID-19 protest blockade at Coutts, Alta., in 2022 has been delayed.
A 10-year-old boy from Lethbridge is being praised as a hero after a routine summer outing at the pool nearly turned tragic for his friend.
A man and woman have been charged after a Lethbridge ice creamery was broken into earlier this week. Staff arrived at Cookie Crimes, in the 300 block of Sixth Street South, just before 5:30 a.m. on Monday to discover the front window broken.
Overnight on Thursday as the community of Elliot Lake was resting to prepare for the upcoming Kraft Hockeyville celebrations, when vandals struck a building that has been top of mind for the northern Ontario city for more than a year.
Ontario Provincial Police remind the public that ‘a case is never closed until it is solved,’ while highlighting the force's continued investigation of the 1996 disappearance of Melanie Ethier.
Sault residents may notice some commotion on the Algoma University campus over the next two weeks as a team conducts an archaeological search.
A mother in a community where the cost of living is one of the highest in the country says grocery prices are 'inhumane' and retailers are putting profits ahead of people’s basic human right to food.
A soccer game in England on Tuesday night drove a spike in online traffic across the Atlantic to a website launched by the Newfoundland and Labrador government.
Newfoundland and Labrador sponsored a minor football team in England, now they’re about to play one of the biggest clubs in European soccer.
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