NASA said Tuesday that a stellar nursery nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula has been captured in crisp detail by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The region of space known as 30 Doradus is characterized by its dusty filaments that look like the legs of a hairy spider and has long been a favorite for astronomy.
Thousands of young stars, distant background galaxies, and the detailed structure of the nebula's gas and dust structures were seen for the first time thanks to the high-resolution instruments of the James Bond movie.
Over the course of the Universe's expansion, the light from objects in the distant universe has been stretched into this wavelength of the IR.
The telescope's primary imager, the Near-Infrared Camera, found that the center of the nebula was filled with radiation from a group of massive young stars.
A young star was caught in the act of releasing a cloud of dust with the help of the Near-Infrared Spectrograph.
The star was thought to be at a later stage of formation when it was first discovered.
The region was imaged using the Mid-IR instrument, which pierces through dust grains that absorb or scatter shorter wavelength.
This revealed never-before-seen points of light within the stellar nursery, which indicate that some stars are still gaining mass.
The Tarantula Nebula has a similar chemical composition to giant star-forming regions that were observed a few billion years after the Bigbang.
This flourishing period of creation can be seen at just 161,000 light-years away.
To understand similarities and differences, scientists should be able to look at distant galaxies from the actual era of the Cosmic noon.
Astronomers are confident that the new era of discovery will be ushered in by the most powerful space telescope ever built, which has been operational sinceJuly.
Agence France- Presse.
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