James Webb Space Telescope

• NASA has unveiled a spectacular new image of the Milky Way taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing ever greater detail of a region close to the nucleus of our home galaxy — replete with needle-like “unexplained structures” .
• JWST was able to take a detailed snapshot of Sagittarius C.
  • Sagittarius C is a central region of the Milky Way where stars are born
  • It is about 300 light years away from Sagittarius A* , the gargantuan black hole that makes up the central hub of our galaxy.
• The image contains an estimated 500,000 twinkly stars plus a cluster of protostars emerging from dense dark clouds of dust and gas.
  • Protostars are stars in the early stages of formation that are still gathering mass.
  • In the image, a cluster of protostars is visible, emitting outflows that illuminate the surrounding infrared-dark cloud.

ABOUT JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE

• JWST is the largest, most powerful infrared space telescope ever built.
• It is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.
• It is placed at Lagrange point 2, approximately 5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
  • Lagrange Points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of a two-body system (like the Sun and the Earth) produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion.
• Its primary mirror is approximately 6.5 metres in diameter.
• It was launched in late 2021, with its first images being released in 2022.
• The telescope was launched with the goal of peering back at the earliest periods of the universe, searching for exoplanets, examining early galaxies, and also charting how stars are formed.