James Webb Telescope Celebrates One Year Anniversary with Picture of Stellar Nursery in Vicinity
The James Webb Space Telescope, which began transmitting breathtaking images of the cosmos a year ago, is now celebrating this achievement by showcasing its exceptional space photographs. The most recent image captures a relatively close area in space, serving as a galactic nursery where 50 youthful stars reside, potentially evolving into systems resembling our own in the future.
The Rho Ophiuch cloud complex is about 390 light years from Earth, which is a pittance compared to the vastness of space, although it would still take 14,500,000 years to get there with current technology. The stars in the image are mostly similar in mass to our beloved sun, and some even have the beginnings of circumstellar disks, which are swirling rings of gas and dust where planets form.
So what are those wonderful red swirls? They are huge jets of molecular hydrogen that are created when a star penetrates its natal veil of cosmic dust and extends into the universe for a time. New life is beautiful and red. Mostly red.
“Web’s image of Rho Ophiuchus allows us to see a very short time in a star’s life cycle with new clarity. Our own sun went through a phase like this a long time ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another star’s story,” said project researcher Klaus Pontoppidan.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been falling after the impact for the past year. There was the first image of the interstellar asteroid belt, a harrowing scene depicting the Pillars of Creation, an image of a cluster of galaxies in the early universe, and more. However, it has not found any aliens. What’s up with that?
