pick up telescope James Webb Astronomers have released new images containing intricate details of a stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula, revealing how stars and planetary systems are formed.
The images shed light on an environment similar to our solar system when it formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. Observing the Orion Nebula will help astronomers better understand what happened during the Milky Way’s first million years of planetary evolution, said an astrophysicist at Western Else University Peters in a press release. .
“We were amazed by the new images of the Orion Nebula. We started this project in 2017, so we have been waiting more than five years for this data. These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform gas and the dust cloud in which they were born.”
Stellar nurseries, like the Orion Nebula, are obscured by large amounts of stardust, making it impossible to study what’s going on inside with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, which relies primarily on visible light.
However, Webb detects infrared light of the universe, which allows observers to see these layers of dust, and detect motion occurring deep within the Orion Nebula, making these the most detailed and clear images ever taken of the nebula, which is located in the constellation Orion 1,350 years away. Photovoltaic from the ground.
“Observing the Orion Nebula was a challenge because it is too bright for Webb’s unprecedentedly sensitive devices,” said research scientist Olivier Bernay of the French National Center for Scientific Research at CNRS.
New images reveal many structures within the nebula, including Proplyds, a central protostar surrounded by a disk of dust and gas in which planets form.
“We’ve never been able to see the intricately fine details of how interstellar matter is formed in these environments, and how planetary systems might form in the presence of this harsh radiation,” said Emily Fabart, associate professor at the Space Astronomical Institute. Interstellar medium in planetary systems.
Also visible at the heart of the Orion Nebula is a trapezoidal group of young, massive stars that make up the dust and gas cloud with their intense ultraviolet radiation, according to the news release.
You can follow the latest news through my lady’s account on Twitter