James Webb takes “amazing” photos of the Orion Nebula | Sciences

It is a wall of dense dust and gas that resembles a colossal winged creature, whose mouth is lit by a shining star as it flies through cosmic filaments.

The nebula is located in the constellation Orion, 1350 light years from Earthin a similar environment in which our solar system was born more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Astronomers are interested in the area To better understand what happened during the first million years of our planet’s evolution.

Images were acquired as part of the program Early launch flagIt includes more than 100 scientists from 18 countries, with institutions including France’s National Center for Scientific Research, Western University of Canada, and the University of Michigan.

“We were surprised by the wonderful pictures of the Orion Nebula”Els Peters, an astrophysicist at Western University, said in a statement.

“These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the cloud of gas and dust from which they were born,” he added.

Nebulae are often obscured by large amounts of dust that would have been impossible to see with visible-light telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor. However, Webb works mainly in the infrared spectrum, which penetrates through dust.

This allowed the discovery of many amazing structures, up to a distance of 40 astronomical units or the size of our solar system.

This includes dense filaments of matter, which can give birth to new generations of stars, as well as star systems consisting of a central protostar surrounded by a disk of dust and gas in which planets form.

“We hope to better understand the full cycle of star birth,” said Edwin Bergin, chair of astronomy at the University of Michigan and a member of the international research team.

“In this image, we observe this cycle as the first generation of stars radiates material to the next. The amazing structures we observe will explain in detail how the feedback loop of star birth occurs in our galaxy and beyond.”

Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, with a 6.5-meter primary mirror made of 18 gold-plated hexagons and a five-layer sunscreen the size of a tennis court.