The latest image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope shows part of our galaxy’s dense center in unprecedented detail, including previously unseen features that astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region called Sagittarius C (Sgr C) is located about 300 light-years away from Sagittarius A, the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way.

“There has never been infrared data in this region at the level of resolution and sensitivity we have with Webb, so we are seeing many features here for the first time,” said Samuel Crowe, principal investigator of the observing team. Undergraduate student at Webb University. University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail that allows us to study star formation in such an environment in a way that has not been possible before.”

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy where current theories of star formation can be subjected to the most stringent tests,” added Professor Jonathan Tan, one of Crowe’s advisors at the University of Virginia.

Among the nearly 500,000 stars in the image is a protocluster (stars still forming and undergoing mass outbursts) that glow like bonfires amid the dark infrared cloud. At the center of this young cluster is a previously known massive protostar with more than 30 times the mass of our Sun.

The cloud from which protostars emerge is so dense that starlight behind it cannot reach Webb, making the cloud appear less crowded when it is one of the most densely packed areas of the image. The image is dotted with smaller dark infrared clouds that resemble holes in the star field. This is where the stars of the future are formed.

Webb’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) instrument also captured large-scale ionized hydrogen emission surrounding the lower part of the dark cloud, shown in blue in the image. Crowe says this is normally the result of energetic photons emitted by young, massive stars, but he says the length of the region Webb showed is a surprise that requires further study. Another feature of the region that Crowe plans to investigate further is the needle-like structures of ionized hydrogen that appear to be randomly oriented in many directions.

“The center of the galaxy is a crowded and restless place. “There are clouds of turbulent, magnetized gas that form stars, and these then influence the surrounding gas with winds, jets and radiation,” said study co-author Ruben Fedriani. The project at the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics in Spain “Webb “It’s given us a wealth of data about this extreme environment, and we’re just starting to investigate it.”

Located about 25,000 light-years from Earth, the galactic center is close enough to study individual stars with the Webb Telescope, allowing astronomers to gather unprecedented information about how stars form and how this process may depend on the space environment, especially compared to others. Regions of the world. galaxies For example, are more massive stars forming in the center of the Milky Way’s spiral arms rather than at their edges?

“The picture Webb got is amazing, and the science we get from it is even better,” Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their cores, so understanding them is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”