NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to provide astronomers with unprecedented views of the universe.
Tuesday, Space Agency released Mosaic image showing a panorama of star formation spanning an astonishing 340 light-years. Astronomers call the main feature in this image 30 Doradus, but it has a more attractive nickname – the Tarantula Nebula – because of its long, dusty filaments.
This stellar nursery is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our Milky Way at a distance of 160,000 light-years. The Tarantula Nebula was indeed a great feature in telescopes because it is the largest and brightest stellar nebula in the local neighborhood of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies.
But Webb brings the nebula to stunning clarity because the telescope observes light in the infrared part of the spectrum, which is light with a wavelength slightly longer than what is visible to the human eye. This allows the telescope to pick up light from distant objects that might be obscured by cosmic dust particles, which are more likely to interfere with light at a shorter wavelength.
As a result, Webb’s imaging of the Tarantula Nebula is rather beautiful, revealing tens of thousands of young stars previously obscured by cosmic dust.
Astronomers are keen to better understand the process by which stars form, which is fundamental to understanding the physics of the universe. Better images and data from Webb will provide new insight into this process and explain why there are so many stars of different sizes, with widely varying properties, in our galaxy and beyond.
“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”