A tarantula was caught in @nasawebb 🕸️
This stellar nursery called 30 Doradus - and nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula - is 161,000 light-years away from our Milky Way galaxy. It's home to the hottest, most massive stars known and has been a favorite for astronomers studying star formation.
Astronomers with the Webb team focused three of the space telescope’s high-resolution infrared instruments on the nebula, which provided stunning photos. MIRI, the Mid-infrared instrument managed here at JPL, captured protostars nestled deep in the clouds of gas and dust, with some still gathering mass. The image above shows MIRI’s image, which is focused on the central star cluster.
The Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) shows the nebula’s cavity (at the center of the second image) that has been hollowed out by blistering radiation from a cluster of massive young stars, which sparkle a pale blue.
Despite humanity’s thousands of years of stargazing, the star-formation process still holds many mysteries – many of them due to our previous inability to get crisp images of what was happening behind the thick clouds of stellar nurseries. Webb has already begun revealing a universe never seen before and is only getting started on rewriting the stellar creation story.
#JWST#JamesWebbSpaceTelescope#Webb#galaxy#StarFormation#stars#protostars#science#space#data#NASA#JPL
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