James Webb Telescope captures new suns being born in Milky Way galaxy

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of a massive region in space with new suns being born in a massive cluster.

The star-forming complex known as N79, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This nebula, a vast region of ionised interstellar atomic hydrogen, is pictured through Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), revealing a cosmic landscape that spans approximately 1,630 light-years.

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N79 is considered a younger sibling to the well-known Tarantula Nebula, or 30 Doradus, another subject of Webb’s recent observations. Remarkably, research indicates that N79’s star formation efficiency surpasses that of the Tarantula Nebula by two-fold over the last half-million years.

The image focuses on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes within N79, specifically the southernmost section labeled N79 South (S1). Surrounding this luminous area is a distinct ‘starburst’ pattern, a series of diffraction spikes that are inherent to telescopes like Webb that utilize mirrors to collect light.

These patterns emerge due to the hexagonal symmetry of Webb’s 18 primary mirror segments and are particularly noticeable around intensely bright and compact objects.

The longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI allow for an extraordinary view of N79’s glowing gas and dust, penetrating deeper into the clouds than shorter wavelengths, which would typically be absorbed or scattered. This mid-infrared perspective also reveals protostars still enveloped within the nebula.

Astronomers are keenly interested in regions like N79 because their chemical makeup mirrors that of the colossal star-forming areas observed during the universe’s nascent years when star formation was at its zenith.

Unlike the Milky Way’s current star-forming regions, which are not as prolific and possess a different chemical composition, N79 offers a unique window into the past. The James Webb Space Telescope now enables astronomers to juxtapose the star formation processes in N79 with those in distant galaxies from the early universe.

These observations are part of a larger Webb program aimed at studying the evolution of circumstellar disks and envelopes around forming stars across various masses and evolutionary stages. With Webb’s unparalleled sensitivity, scientists anticipate detecting planet-forming dust disks around stars with masses similar to our Sun within the LMC for the first time.

The new data promises to deepen our understanding of the cosmos and the origins of stars and planetary systems.