Photo credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Samuel Crowe (UVA)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of the Milky Way galaxy like never before. This includes the star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), located approximately 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.
In addition to the estimated 500,000 stars in the image, Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) also captured a cluster of protostars, resulting in outflows that glow like a bonfire in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. Why is this significant? Well, there’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that Webb can provide, so astronomers are seeing lots of features here for the first time.
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The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation. Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it,” said Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain.
