Astronomy: The Webb Telescope takes amazing images

The Webb Telescope has captured stunning images of the Milky Way’s dense center. The images are a goldmine for astronomers.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been in operation for nearly two years. In this short time, astronomers have already made some amazing discoveries. Now the US space agency NASA has once again published amazing images taken by the telescope.

The images show part of the dense center of our galaxy – the Milky Way. The images are high-resolution so scientists can see details that were never possible to see before.

“Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail that allows us to study star formation in this type of environment in ways that were not possible before,” explains lead researcher Samuel Crowe from the University of Virginia.

The region captured by the telescope, called Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is located about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. It is considered a star formation region. A detailed view of the center of our home galaxy offers researchers unimaginable possibilities.

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way Galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be severely tested,” said Professor Jonathan Tan, one of Crow’s advisors at the University of Virginia.

Protostars can also be observed among the nearly 500,000 stars that can be seen in the images. Protostars are stars that have just begun to evolve. In the center of this cluster, researchers were able to discover a previously unknown massive protostar that weighs more than 30 times the weight of our Sun.

The center of the Milky Way Galaxy is located 25,000 light-years from Earth. Using the Webb telescope, astronomers can now gather information about how stars form – and how this process depends on their cosmic environment. “Webb’s image is amazing, and the science we will learn from it is even better,” explains Samuel Crowe.