According to NASA, the image is inside the Great Eagle Nebula, which is 6,500 light-years from Earth.
According to NASA, the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has captured the iconic pillars of creation, huge structures of gas and dust filled with stars.
The James Webb Space Telescope has taken the first photo of the gigantic gold, copper and brown columns inside the Great Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light-years from Earth, the U.S. space agency said Wednesday. United States in a statement.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope first captured images of the Pillars in 1995.
But thanks to Webb’s infrared capabilities, the newest telescope, launched into space less than a year ago, can peer through the Pillars’ opacity, revealing the formation of new stars.
Webb’s images show bright red lava-like spots at the ends of several pillars. “These are ejections from stars that are still forming,” NASA said of a few hundred thousand years old
These “young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars,” he added.
‘So many stars’
“By popular demand, we had to make the pillars of creation,” Klaus Pontoppidan, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute’s (STScI) science program, said on Twitter.
STScI operates Webb from Baltimore, Maryland.
“There are so many stars!” Pontoppidan added.
NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn summed it up: “The universe is beautiful!” he wrote on Twitter.
This is what you’ve been waiting for.
Travel with us through Webb’s stunning view of the Pillars of Creation, where dozens of newly formed stars glisten like dewdrops amid floating, translucent columns of gas and dust:
Here’s your guided tour ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/jFiDDrMUPl
— NASA Hallo-Webb Telescope 🕸🕷🎃 (@NASAWebb) October 19, 2022
The image, which covers an area of about eight light-years, was taken by Webb’s primary imager, NIRCam, which captures near-infrared wavelengths invisible to the human eye.
The colors in the image have been “translated” into visible light.
According to NASA, the new image “will help researchers revamp their star formation models by identifying much more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the amounts of gas and dust in the region.”
They also said that “each advanced instrument gives researchers new details about this region, which is practically full of stars.”
Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built and has already released an unprecedented array of data. Scientists hope it will herald a new era of discovery.
One of the main goals of the $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another main focus of research is exoplanets, planets outside of Earth’s solar system.