Webb image reveals previously obscured newborn stars

Astronomers took a deep-dive into the James Webb Space Telescope's image of the "Cosmic Cliffs" of the Carina Nebula and found a dozen previously unknown newborn stars.

James webb space telescope image of newborn stars in Carina nebula

The newborn stars were found in the NGC 3324 region of the Carina Nebula in the image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI)

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

Astronomers took a “deep dive” into one of the first images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and spotted the telltale signs of two dozen stars that are around 7,500 light years away from Earth and were previously unseen.

For the research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers investigated Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera instrument) data of the “Cosmic Cliffs,” a star-forming region known as NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. The instrument helps astronomers look through clouds of interstellar dust.

“What Webb gives us is a snapshot in time to see just how much star formation is going on in what may be a more typical corner of the universe that we haven’t been able to see before. The findings speak both to how good the telescope is and to how much there is going on in even quiet corners of the universe,” said Megan Reiter, co-author of the study, in a press statement. Reiter is an assistant professor for physics and astronomy at the University of Rice.

NGC 3324 hosts many well-known regions of star formation but many details from the region have been obscured by dust in previous images from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Webb’s infrared camera was built to peer through dust in such regions to detect jets of gas and dust emitted from the poles of very young stars.

Also read | The 5 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2022: Fusion energy, ‘life after death’, and more

Reiter and fellow researchers turned their attention to a particular portion of NGC 3324 where only a few young stars had previously been found. They analysed a specific infrared wavelength (4.7 microns) and discovered two dozen new outflows of molecular hydrogen from young stars. These outflows came in different sizes but many seemingly came from protostars that will become stars with masses close to the Earth’s sun.

Newborn stars

In the first 10,000 years of their life, newborn stars gather material from the gas and dust around them to grow bigger in a process known as accretion. Most really young stars throw back a fraction of that material back into space as jets that stream out in opposite directions from their poles. Molecular hydrogen, which is a vital ingredient for these newborn stars, gets swept up by these jets and can be detected by JWST.

According to the University of Rice, astronomers have found it difficult to study this early accretion period of star formation because it lasts only for a few thousand years, which is a blink of an eye in the multimillion-year life childhood periods of stars. Also, according to co-author Jon Morse, of Caltech, such jets would only be visible when astronomers embark on such a “deep-dive,” dissecting data from different filters and analysing small parts of the full image.

Tags:
James Webb Space Telescope