On a routine Tuesday that likely felt anything but routine to anyone in deep space, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope turned its golden eye toward the heart of our galaxy and delivered what scientists are calling the most detailed portrait yet of the Milky Way’s dense and rather melodramatic core.
The image, a veritable cosmic group photo, zooms in on a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C, which lies approximately 25,000 light-years away near the somewhat overstimulated center of our galaxy. Aptly described by scientists as “teeming,” the area now stars in a JWST snapshot featuring more than 500,000 individual stars. A few of them are politely twinkling for the camera, while others, perhaps unaware of the publicity, continue the millennia-long business of nuclear fusion undisturbed.
The telescope, which launched in late 2021 and has been silently judging the universe with infrared precision ever since, spotted a particularly dense cluster of protostars engulfed in a veil of gas and dust, which experts say is either a galaxy-wide baby shower or a sign that the Milky Way has been hoarding stellar embryos. The central protostar in this bright knot claims such luminosity that scientists believe it may one day become a hefty new celestial neighbor weighing in at over ten times the mass of our own Sun.
“Just staring at this image, there’s so much going on,” said Samuel Crowe, a University of Virginia PhD student and presumably a man who doesn’t blink much. “There’s so much detail.”
The image is made possible by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera or NIRCam, which is blessed with the ability to see through cosmic clutter that would befuddle lesser telescopes. The portrait reveals plumes of heated hydrogen gas, tangled webs of interstellar dust and what astronomers suggest are signs of outflows from newborn stars. Cosmic chaos, it appears, is not only common but photogenic.
For context, Sagittarius C is located uncomfortably close to Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central black hole, which for the record remains invisible in the photo because being fashionable is never quite as important as crushing everything with gravity. Between the glowing gas and mysteriously dark voids, scientists are now combing the image for clues into how stars are made, how galaxies evolve and whether the universe is, deep down, just showing off at this point.
According to Crowe and his co-authors, including scientists from multiple NASA centers and institutions in the US and Europe, the image represents a significant advance in our ability to understand star formation in such cluttered galactic neighborhoods. The full findings are expected to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, assuming the universe does not feel the need to surprise us again before press time.
For now, humanity is left to marvel at the cosmic fireworks and wonder whether the galactic core is always this photogenic or just whenever we’re looking.
Somewhere in space, the stars are saying cheese.