The Webb telescope made a discovery in the Tarantula Nebula – the center of star formation
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“A giant space tarantula has been caught” by NASA’s high-sensitivity James Webb Space Telescope.
The Tarantula Nebula, located 161,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, is the largest and brightest star-forming region closest to the Milky Way.
Resembling a tarantula, according to NASA, it contains the hottest and most massive. The Webb Telescope’s near-infrared camera, also called NIRCam, has helped researchers see the region “in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust.”
The densest surrounding regions of the nebula resist erosion by strong stellar winds, forming pillars that appear to point back towards the cluster and hold on to forming protostars.
These protostars emerge from their “dusty cocoons” and help form the nebula. The Webb Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) has captured a very young star, changing astronomers’ understanding.
“Astronomers previously thought that this star might be a bit older and is already in the process of clearing the bubble around it,” NASA said. “However, NIRSpec showed that the star had just begun to emerge from its column and still retained an insulating cloud of dust around it.
Without Webb’s high-resolution infrared spectra, this episode of star formation in action would not have been detected.
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