Categories: Technology

The James Webb Telescope zooms spectacularly on a star nursery in a neighboring galaxy

NASA and ESA sporadically release images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope that are spectacular but also serve to advance science. The last question concerns the study of large open clusters of young stars such as many in the star-forming regions of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

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The James-Webb Space Telescope continues to delight us, this time zooming in on one of the regions of feverish young star formation that can be found in the Large Magellanic Cloud (for the LMC Large Magellanic Cloud in English), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The nursery is a nebula extending about 1,630 light-years across the generally unexplored southwestern region of the LMC and containing a large cluster of young stars that ionize the hydrogen atoms of the nebula known as N79 through their radiation. It is therefore an example of a region of ionized interstellar atomic hydrogen known as the H II region (neutral atomic hydrogen is called HI by astrophysicists).

N79 is generally considered a smaller version of the Tarantula Nebula (also called 30 Doradus, or NGC 2070, or Caldwell 103). This is another region of nuclear clouds where young stellar nurseries, open clusters, are formed by gravitational collapse, known because they have an apparent magnitude close to 5 and are therefore easily visible to the eye. At the immediate periphery of the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years from the naked Solar System, as a small and bright condensation.


This zoom video begins with a wide view of the Milky Way and ends with a close-up of a rich star-forming region in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern constellation Dorado. The specific region shown, 30 Doradus, is also known as the Tarantula Nebula. The final view of these clouds was taken by ESO’s VLT and Vista, and superimposed on new radio data taken by ALMA. The ALMA data show bright yellow-red streaks of cold, dense gas that has the potential to collapse and form new stars. ©ESO/Digitized Sky Survey

2/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)/R. Gendler (http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/), Alma (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Wong and al, ESO/M.-R. Zion/Vista Magellanic Cloud Survey. Acceptance : Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit. Music : John Dyson

N79, a laboratory for understanding star formation in the young universe

The image released by NASA and ESA is in false colors (photons with a wavelength of 7.7 microns are displayed in blue, 10 microns in cyan, 15 microns in yellow and 21 microns in red) because they were taken by the instrument. Web mid-infrared (pepper) in the mid-infrared spectral band to which our eyes are not sensitive. It is accompanied by a lengthy commentary from which we include a few extracts.

He thus explains that star-forming regions like N79 “ They are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to the massive star-forming regions observed when the universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Our galaxy, the star-forming regions of the Milky Way, does not produce stars at the same rate as N79 and has a different chemical composition. The Web now offers astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in N79 with extensive telescope observations of distant galaxies in the early universe.

These observations of N79 are part of a web program that studies the evolution of circumstellar disks and forming stars over a wide mass range and at different stages of evolution. The web’s sensitivity will allow scientists for the first time to detect disks of planet-forming dust around stars of the same mass as our Sun at the distance of the LMC.

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