The James Webb Telescope has discovered more than 500,000 stars! In the middle of a chaotic galaxy

New images taken by James Webb reveal the most chaotic region of deep space in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It contains more than 500,000 stars, challenging current concepts of star formation.

Galaxy – The image was captured by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), a powerful instrument of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and gazes into a region called Sagittarius C, an active star-forming region. It is about 300 light-years away from the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, Sagittarius A*.

This star-bearing region, called Sagittarius C (Sgr C), lies about 300 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. Image source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, S. Crowe (UVA)

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way Galaxy. Current star formation theories can now be tested at the most stringent level,” said Jonathan Tan, a professor and researcher in astronomy at the University of Virginia.
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What’s interesting is that the region contains an estimated 500,000 stars, forming amid dense dust clouds.
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Some of them turned out to be stars 30 times more massive than our sun, raising the question of how they survive in such extreme environments.
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James Webb’s study of the center of the Milky Way could provide insight into these processes. It may also help answer the question: Massive stars tend to form near the centers of galaxies. Over the Outer Rim or other regions of the galaxy?
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“There has never been any infrared data in this area with the level of accuracy and sensitivity that we got from Webb, so we see many features here for the first time,” said Samuel Crowe, the school’s principal. (Samuel Crowe), the headmaster, is a researcher and undergraduate student at the University of Virginia
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“Webb reveals a tremendous amount of detail. This allows us to study star formation in this environment in a way that was not possible before,” Crowe added. “The most unusual feature may be the blue area at the bottom of the image.”
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Scientists believe that this is created when high-energy photons from massive young stars hit the ionized hydrogen surrounding them, creating the blue color in the image. But they still don’t understand why there are unusually large amounts of energy gas, as previously thought.
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“The footage from Webb is amazing. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear core,” Crowe said, so understanding them better is like learning about the origins of most universes.
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The center of the Milky Way Galaxy is a less studied area. Because of the chaos of the stars, they emit radio waves and different waves all the time. Moreover, there are many dense dust clouds that block the starlight, so only a little passes through it. However, it is an important region of the galaxy that nurtures new generations of stars.
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The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter and is estimated to contain 100 to 400 billion stars, and our solar system is about 27,000 light-years from the galactic center.

Researched and edited by Witit Borompichaichartkul

Origin
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https://www.iflscience.com/jwst-looks-into-heart-of-our-galaxy-and-spots-mysterious-features-71644
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https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/20/world/webb-telescope-milky-way-heart-scn/index.html
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https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-reveals-new-features-in-heart-of-milky-way/


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