The Webb Telescope continues to reveal images of space in never-before-seen detail. The most recent, revealed this Wednesday, are from tarantula Nebula, a region of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy (orbiting the Milky Way), about 161,000 light-years distant from Earth, an extremely luminous nebula with a cluster of stars at its center.
The novelty this time is that image reveals tens of thousands of young stars never before detected by other telescopes because they are shrouded in cosmic clouds.
“Thousands of never-before-seen young stars have been detected in the stellar nursery 30 Doradus [outro nome da nebulosa]”, reads the website dedicated to the work of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula for the appearance of its dusty filaments seen in earlier images, the nebula has long been a favorite of astronomers studying star formation.” In addition, the NASA statement says, the telescope revealed distant background galaxies, as well as the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust.
A nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust and gases that is often a site of star formation, which is why many nebulae are also called nurseries. According to NASA, the Tarantula Nebula “is home to the hottest and most massive stars known.”
In the image, captured by NIRCam, an instrument aboard Webb that makes near-infrared observations, the most active zone, that is, where most new stars will emerge, is the one that has a pale blue hue. The region is 340 light-years across.
“One of the reasons the Tarantula Nebula is interesting to astronomers is that the nebula has a type of chemical composition similar to the giant star-forming regions seen in the ‘cosmic noon’ of the universe, when the cosmos he had only a few billion dollars. years and star formation was at its peak,” NASA explains in its statement.
NASA ends by saying that despite thousands of years of stargazing, their formation process “still harbors many mysteries, many of them due to our previous inability to obtain clear images” of what was happening behind the nursery clouds. stellar. “Webb has already begun to reveal a never-before-seen universe and is just beginning to rewrite the story of stellar creation.”
Source: Observadora
