The Perseus Nebula, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A Scholz, K Muzic, A Langeveld, R Jayawardhana
The powerful space telescope is helping scientists learn more about how stars are born, while a crisis in cosmology created by Webb’s readings may have been solved.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been used to uncover the mysteries within a distant star-forming nebula.
The space observatory took a look at NGC 1333, a nebula that is 960 light-years away from Earth in the Perseus molecular cloud. This cluster was featured in an anniversary image from the Hubble Space Telescope last year, but this image only scratched the surface of what lies within.
With a larger aperture than Hubble and with powerful infrared instruments, Webb is capable of peering through the dust and gas of Perseus to reveal newborn stars, brown dwarfs and planetary mass objects within the nebula. The latest image lets scientists learn more about star formation by seeing them in their younger years.
There are large patches of orange in the James Webb image, which represents gas glowing thanks to the telescope’s infrared instruments. These patches – known as Herbig-Haro objects – form when ionised material ejected from young stars collide with surrounding clouds. The European Space Agency says these objects are hallmarks of a very active site of star formation.
Many of the young stars in this image are surrounded by discs of gas and dust, which may eventually produce planetary systems. Researchers believe our own sun had a similar origin to these stars, being formed as part of a cluster that may have been more massive than NGC 1333.
Researchers estimate that the stars in this image are only between 1m and 3m years old. This allows them to study stars similar to our sun in their earlier stages, as well as brown dwarfs and free-floating planets.
Solving a cosmology crisis
Meanwhile, scientists looking at earlier images from Webb have come up with a reason why galaxies seemed larger than we expected.
Some of the results from Webb contradicted our timeline of the universe and how galaxies form. The size of these distant galaxies – which existed only shortly after the Big Bang – were so large that simulations could not account for them, according to NASA.
But a new study believes the reason these galaxies appear so large in the images is because of an effect black holes have on the images. The black holes in these images are consuming gas and this process emits light and heat, making the galaxies appear much brighter than if the light was only coming from stars.
“We are still seeing more galaxies than predicted, although none of them are so massive that they ‘break’ the universe,” said study leader Katherine Chworowsky.
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