The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stellar nursery in a nearby galaxy. The star forming region is producing particularly massive stars. The energetic outpourings from the stars are shaping the surrounding clouds of gas and dust.
NGC 604 as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI).
Astronomers have used the sensitive infrared gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope to peer into the stellar nursery designated as NGC 604. The star forming region is within the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), at a distance of 2.73 million lightyears from the Earth. Within the clouds of gas and dust are over 200 large, hot stars. These are B type and O type stars, the latter of which contain more mass than 100 Suns. The concentration of such massive stars is unusual, and there are no comparable stellar nurseries within our own galaxy. The proximity of the stellar nurseries provides a window to scientists to observe the earliest stages in the lives of the most massive stars in the universe.
Embedded within the stellar nurseries are cavities carved out by the energetic outpourings from the massive, young stars. The stellar winds from these stars shape the surrounding gas and dust, at times causing the formation of new stars. The bluish white material is ionised hydrogen, while the reddish material is composed of carbon based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs play an important role in star formation and planetary assembly, but scientists do not fully understand the origin of the material.
Some of the stars from the surrounding galaxy are red supergiants, which are large but very cool stars. These stars are hundreds of times the size of the Sun. The stellar nursery measures about 1,300 lightyears across, and is estimated to be around 3.5 million years old. Webb has observed the star forming region with both the scientific instruments on board the telescope, the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) as well as the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Such observations improve the scientific understanding of the life cycles of stars. Towards the top-left corner is a foreground star with the signature six-pointed diffraction spikes seen on Webb images, that only appear over particularly bright and concentrated sources of light.
