SEE IT: NASA’s James Webb space telescope captures photo of star cluster 200,000 light-years away
Misty Severi
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A new image taken by NASA’s James Webb space telescope showed a young star cluster located 200,000 light years from Earth, offering new insight into the early stages of the universe.
The image shows a young cluster of stars, located in the NGC 346 region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is a dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way. Scientists are particularly interested in the cluster because it’s similar to conditions of an era when star formation was at its peak, billions of years ago.
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Olivia Jones, the lead author of a paper featuring the image, said it gives scientists more information on the process of how stars are formed.
“This is the first time we can detect the full sequence of star formation of both low and high mass stars in another galaxy,” Jones said in a NASA news release. “This means we have far more data to study at high resolution, offering us new information on how the birth of stars shapes their environment and even greater insight into the star formation process.”
The cluster, which is about 3 million to 5 million years old, also includes clouds of gas and dust that are still developing into stars. As the star forms, the dust and gas resemble ribbons that come from a surrounding molecular cloud. The material is then collected into an accretion disk that feeds a central protostar, according to NASA.
Scientists hope that studying the formation could give additional insight into how stars were formed during the “cosmic noon,” about 2 billion to 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
“We’re seeing the building blocks, not only of stars but also potentially of planets,” Guido De Marchi, of the European Space Agency and a co-investigator on the research team, said. “Since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to galaxies during cosmic noon, it’s possible that rocky planets could have formed earlier in the Universe than we might have thought.”
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The photo comes a day after NASA discovered a new Earth-sized planet that it considers “habitable.” It is located in the TOI 700 system, which refers to the star the planet revolves around. The planet is located in the star’s habitable zone, which refers to the right distance from a star where water can exist on the planet without it being too hot or cold for life to exist.