“Amazing” images of a stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope reveal intricate details about how stars and planetary systems form.
The images, published on Monday, 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, astrophysicist Western Else Peters said in a press release.
“We were blown away by the amazing images of the Orion Nebula,” Peters said. “We started this project in 2017, so we’ve been waiting over five years to get this data.”
“These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the gas and dust cloud in which they were born,” Peters added.
The cores of 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 the infrared light of the universe, which allows observers to see these layers of dust, and to detect motion occurring deep within the Orion Nebula. These are the most detailed and clear images ever taken of the nebula – located in the constellation Orion about 1,350 light-years from Earth – and the most recent view from the Webb Telescope, which went live in July.
“Observing the Orion Nebula was a challenge because it is so bright for unprecedentedly sensitive Webb devices. But Webb is amazing, as Webb can observe distant and faint galaxies, as well as Jupiter and Orion, two of the brightest sources in the infrared sky,” said research scientist Olivier Bernier. At CNRS, France’s National Center for Scientific Research, in the press release.
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 forms in these environments, and learn how planetary systems might form in the presence of this harsh radiation. These images reveal the legacy of the interstellar medium in planets,” said Emily Habart, associate professor at the Astrophysical Institute of Spatial. (IAS) in France.
Also evident at the heart of the Orion Nebula is a trapezoidal cluster of young, massive stars that make up the dust and gas cloud with their intense ultraviolet radiation, according to the news release.
Understanding how this radiation affects the cluster’s circumference is fundamental to understanding the formation of stellar systems.
“Massive young stars emit large amounts of ultraviolet radiation directly into the original cloud that still surrounds them, and this changes the physical shape of the cloud as well as its chemical composition. How accurate this is, and how it affects further formation of stars and planets is not yet known.”
The images will be studied by an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists in 18 countries known as PDRs4All.
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