Webb celebrates the first year of science with a close-up of the birth of sun-like stars

From the solar system’s cosmic backyard to distant galaxies near the dawn of time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered on its promise to reveal the universe like never before in its first year of science operations. To celebrate the conclusion of a successful first year, a new web image of the young star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex has been released.

A new Webb image released today shows the star forming region closest to us. Its close proximity, at 390 light-years away, allows for great detail, with no foreground stars visible in the intervening space.

The region shown contains about 50 young stars, each with a mass similar to that of the Sun or less. The darker regions are the denser, with thick dust surrounding the still-forming protostars. Huge red dipole flows of molecular hydrogen dominate the image, appearing horizontally in the upper third and vertically to the right. These occur when a star first explodes through its envelope born of cosmic dust, shooting a pair of opposing jets into space. In contrast, the star S1 has carved a bright cavern of dust in the lower half of the image. It is the only star in the image that is much larger than the Sun.

Some of the stars in the image show shadows that indicate protoplanetary disks – possible future planetary systems in the making.

Since the first deep-field image, revealed in July 2022, Webb has made good on its promise to show us more of the universe than ever before. However, Webb has revealed more than just distant galaxies in the early universe.

In addition to the dazzling infrared images, what really excites scientists are Webb’s sharp spectra — the detailed information that can be gathered from the light by the telescope’s spectral analysis instruments. Webb’s spectra confirmed the distances to some of the most distant galaxies ever observed and discovered the oldest and most distant supermassive black holes. They determined the compositions of planets’ atmospheres (or lack thereof) in more detail than ever before, and narrowed down for the first time the types of atmospheres that might exist on rocky exoplanets. They have also revealed the chemical composition of stellar nurseries and protoplanetary disks, discovered water and organic molecules containing carbon and much more. Webb’s notes have produced hundreds of scholarly articles that answer long-standing questions and raise new questions for Webb to deal with.

The breadth of Webb’s science is also evident in his observations of the most common region of space – the solar system. Faint rings of gas giants loom in the darkness, punctuated by moons, while Webb shows distant galaxies in the background. By comparing discoveries of water and other molecules in our solar system to those in the disks of other, much smaller planetary systems, Webb is helping build clues about our origins – how Earth came to be the perfect place. for life as we know it.

One year later, Webb’s science mission is just getting started. A second year of observations has already been picked up, with plans to develop an exciting first year that exceeded expectations.

European Space Agency (ESA)