NASA celebrates the James Webb Telescope with an amazing picture of the birth of stars

The James Webb Telescope has been providing fascinating impressions from space for a year. NASA celebrates this special for the birth of a star.

MUNICH – For a year now, the James Webb Space Telescope has been providing humanity with the most impressive images from space ever found. To celebrate the anniversary, NASA celebrated a particularly stunning example of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex – the closest star formation region to Earth.

The commemorative photo, NASA wrote, “shows star formation like never before, full of detail, and impressionistic texture.” He continues: “Some stars show a clear shadow of the interstellar disk, which is the material of future planetary systems.” The “closeness” of 390 light-years allows for extremely detailed close-ups with no foreground stars in space in between. The web image shows a region with about 50 young stars, all of similar mass to the Sun or smaller. The darker regions are the denser, where thick dust forms the cocoons that are still forming protostars.

NASA/James Webb: Huge dipole flows of molecular hydrogen dominate the picture

Huge dipole jets of molecular hydrogen, shown in red, dominate the image, appearing horizontally in the upper third and vertically on the right. These occur, according to NASA, when a star first ruptures its newborn shell of cosmic dust, launching two opposing jets into space, like a newborn baby stretching out its arms to the world for the first time. In contrast, the star “S1” formed a glowing dust cavity in the lower half of the image. It is the only star in the image that is much larger than the Sun.

“Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to experience a very brief period in the stellar life cycle with new clarity. Our Sun went through such a phase a long time ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of The history of another star.

James Webb telescope “a marvel of engineering”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also spoke of the first year with the Supertelescope: In just one year, it “changed the way humanity sees the universe.” Each new image is “a new discovery and gives scientists around the world the opportunity to ask and answer questions they have never dreamed of before.” Thousands of engineers, scientists, and leaders “put their passion into this mission, and their efforts will continue to improve our understanding of the origins of the universe—and our place in it.”

Nicola Fox, deputy director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, also hailed it as “a marvel of engineering created by the world’s leading scientists and engineers. It has given us a deeper understanding of the galaxies, stars, and atmospheres of planets outside our solar system than ever before, laying the foundation for NASA to be a pioneer.” Worldwide.” Webb is an international program run by NASA with its partners Esa (the European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

It is not only through the James Webb telescope that humanity gains insight into the universe. Old data from NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe shows this: Four of the 27 moons of Uranus hide a secret within them. A NASA spacecraft recently discovered a mysterious rock on Mars. (cgsc)