The Webb Space Telescope reveals new, unexplained structures at the center of the galaxy

there NASA has revealed a stunning new image An image of the Milky Way taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing increasingly fine details of a region near the heart of our home galaxy, filled with what the space agency calls “s.”Inexplicable structures“In the shape of a needle. Which puzzled and astonished scientists.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a powerful infrared instrument, has captured a detailed snapshot of Sagittarius C, a central region of the Milky Way where stars are born that is about 300 light-years away from the giant black hole that makes it up. The central axis of our galaxy.

The image contains about 500,000 bright stars as well as a cluster of protostars emerging from dense dark clouds of dust and gas (protostars are young stars that gain mass before they become full-grown stars).

In addition to the stars, the telescope revealed feathery wisps, believed to be emissions of ionized hydrogen and the cyan color in the image. These clumps are usually the product of massive stars emitting excited photons that ionize the surrounding hydrogen gas.

Look back

Within these clumps, scientists are puzzled by the presence of striated, needle-like structures that are randomly generated throughout the ionized hydrogen. Scientists don’t know what it is and are determined to search for more data to find out.

“There has never been infrared data in this region with the same level of resolution and sensitivity that we get with Webb, so we see a lot of features here for the first time,” said Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student and lead researcher at UCLA. University of Virginia. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this type of environment in a way that was not possible before.”

The Webb Telescope was launched in late 2021, with its first images released in 2022. The telescope was launched with the aim of looking into the early periods of the universe, searching for exoplanets, examining the first galaxies, as well as tracking stars. Formats, like the one captured in this last photo.

Scientists are excited about this new shot because not only is it beautiful, but it could also help researchers understand how stars appear in the first place.

“The center of the galaxy is a crowded, turbulent place,” said Rubén Fedriani, a researcher and co-researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics in Andalusia. “There are magnetized, turbulent gas clouds that form stars, which then influence the surrounding gas with their winds, jets, and outgoing radiation. Webb has given us a lot of data about this extreme environment, and we’re just starting to dig into it.”