Breathtaking images of a stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, are revealing intricate details about how stars and planetary systems form.
The images, released on Monday (12), shed light on an environment similar to our own solar system when it formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. Observing the Orion Nebula will help space scientists better understand what happened during the first million years of the Milky Way’s planetary evolution, Western University astrophysicist Els Peeters said in a press release.
“We are amazed by the breathtaking images of the Orion Nebula. We started this project in 2017, so we’ve waited more than five years to get this data,” said Peeters.
“These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the cloud of gas and dust in which they are born,” added Peeters.
The hearts of stellar nurseries like the Orion Nebula are obscured by vast amounts of stardust, making it impossible to study what’s happening inside with instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, which rely primarily on visible light.
Webb, however, detects infrared light from the cosmos, which allows observers to see through these layers of dust, revealing the action happening deep within the Orion Nebula, the statement said. The images are the sharpest and most detailed ever taken of the nebula — which is situated in the constellation Orion, 1,350 light-years from Earth — and the latest offering from the Webb telescope, which began operating in July.
“Observing the Orion Nebula was a challenge because it is too bright for Webb’s unprecedented sensitive instruments. But Webb is amazing, Webb can observe distant and faint galaxies, as well as Jupiter and Orion, which are some of the brightest sources in the infrared sky,” researcher Olivier Berné from CNRS, the French National Center for Scientific Research, said in a statement to the press. press.
The new images reveal numerous 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 intricate details of how interstellar matter is structured in these environments, and figure out how planetary systems can form in the presence of this harsh radiation. These images reveal the heritage of the interstellar medium in systems,” said Emilie Habart, associate professor at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in France.
Also clearly visible at the heart of the Orion Nebula is the trapezoid cluster of massive young stars that shape the cloud of dust and gas with their intense ultraviolet radiation, according to the press release. Understanding how this radiation affects the cluster’s surroundings is critical to understanding the formation of star systems.
“Massive young stars emit large amounts of ultraviolet radiation directly into the native cloud that still surrounds them, and this changes the physical shape of the cloud as well as its chemical composition. How precisely this works and how it further affects the formation of stars and planets is still not well known,” said Peeters.
The images will be studied by an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists in 18 countries known as PDRs4All.
Source: CNN Brasil
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