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Resembling a burrowing tarantula’s home line with its silk, it houses the hottest and most massive stars known to astronomers, according to NASA.
The Webb telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera, also called NIRCam, has helped researchers see the region “in a new light, including tens of thousands of never-before-seen young stars that were previously shrouded in cosmic dust,” according to NASA.
These protostars emerge from their “dusty cocoons” and help shape the nebula. The Webb telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught a very young star doing that, which changed astronomers’ previous beliefs about that star.
“Astronomers previously thought this star might be a bit older and already in the process of clearing out a bubble around itself,” according to NASA. “However, NIRSpec showed that the star was only just beginning to emerge from its pillar and still maintained an insulating cloud of dust around itself.
“Without Webb’s high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths, this episode of star formation in action could not have been revealed.”
Viewing through another Webb instrument that detects longer infrared wavelengths, and therefore penetrates dust grains in the nebula, revealed a “previously unseen cosmic environment,” NASA said — the hot stars faded while the cooler gas and dust glowed.
The Tarantula Nebula has long been a focus of astronomers studying star formation because it has a chemical makeup similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions at the universe’s cosmic noon — when the cosmos was just a feel billion years old and star formation was at its peak, according to NASA.
Since star-forming regions in our galaxy don’t produce stars at the same rate as the Tarantula Nebula and have a different chemical composition, the Tarantula is the closest example of what occurred in the universe as it reached high noon.
Capturing star formation in the Tarantula Nebula is just the latest discovery by NASA’s Webb telescope.
Webb launched on Christmas Day last year after decades of work to create the world’s largest most sophisticated space telescope.
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