WASHINGTON: The James Webb Space Telescope captured the famous “pillars of creation,” giant structures of gas and dust filled with stars, NASA said Wednesday, and the image is as spectacular as one could hope for. .
The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope’s first shot of gold, copper and brown columns standing at the center of the cosmos.
Many of the pillars have bright red, lava-like spots on their tops. “These are emissions from stars that are still forming,” just a few hundred thousand years old, NASA said in a statement.
The US space agency added that these “young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with these thick pillar-like clouds of material.”
The “Pillars of Creation” are located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the Eagle Nebula in our Milky Way Galaxy.
The pillars were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured them first in 1995 and again in 2014.
But thanks to Webb’s infrared capabilities, the new telescope – launched into space less than a year ago – can see the dimming of the pillars, revealing the formation of many new stars.
“By popular demand, we had to do the Pillars of Creation with the Web,” Klaus Pontopeden, science program manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said on Twitter on Wednesday.
STScI operates the web from Baltimore, Maryland.
“There are just too many stars!” Added Pontoppidan.
NASA astrophysicist Amber Strawn summed it up: “The universe is beautiful!” he wrote on Twitter.
The image, which covers an area of ​​about eight light-years, was taken by the web’s primary imager NIRCam, which captures near-infrared wavelengths – invisible to the human eye.
The colors of the image are “translated” into visible light.
According to NASA, the new image will “help researchers refine their models of star formation by identifying a much more accurate number of newly forming stars along with the amount of gas and dust in the region.”
Operational since July, Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, and has already yielded unprecedented data. Scientists hope it will usher in a new era of discovery.
One of the main goals of the $10 billion telescope is to study the life cycle of stars. Another major research focus is on exoplanets, planets outside Earth’s solar system.
