(Cape Canaveral) The James Webb Space Telescope marks a year of cosmic photography with one of its finest shots to date: the spectacular close-up of dozens of stars as they are born.
NASA unveiled the latest snapshot on Wednesday, revealing 50 baby stars in a cloud complex 390 light years away. One light year is approximately 9.7 trillion kilometers.
The region is relatively quiet, but full of glowing gas, hydrogen jets, and even cocoons of dust containing the delicate beginnings of other stars.
Not all young stars seem bigger than our sun. Scientists said the stunning shot offered the best possible clarity of this brief phase in a star’s life.
“It’s like a glimpse of what our own system would have looked like billions of years ago when it was formed,” NASA program scientist Eric Smith told The Associated Press. .
Mr Smith pointed out that the light visible in the image is actually part 390 years ago.
This cloud complex, known as Rho Ophiuchi, is the closest star forming region to Earth and is found in the sky near the boundary of the constellations Ophiuchus and Scorpius, the Serpent Bearer and the Scorpion. NASA noted that with no stars in the foreground of the photo, the details stand out all the more. According to NASA, some stars show shadows indicating possible planets in the making.
This photo “presents the birth of stars as an impressionistic masterpiece”, commented on Twitter Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA.
James Webb, the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever launched into space, has been producing snapshots of cosmic beauty for a year. The first images of the infrared telescope, whose cost amounts to 10 billion US, were unveiled last July, six months after its takeoff from French Guiana.
It is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting Earth for 33 years. The result of a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, the James Webb Telescope scans the universe from a more distant point, 1.6 million kilometers away.
Astronomers hope to gaze at the first stars and galaxies in the universe, while scanning the cosmos for signs of life on planets outside our solar system.
“We haven’t found one yet,” Smith said. But we are only one year after the start of the mission. »