Webb spots never-before-seen features in heart of Milky Way

New Delhi: The next-generation James Webb Space Telescope has in a new image captured a portion of the dense centre of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain.

The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A.

“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” said principal investigator Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.

“The galactic centre is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,” added Professor Jonathan Tan, from the University of Virginia. Amid the estimated 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars - stars that are still forming and gaining mass - producing outflows that glow like a bonfire in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud.

At the heart of this young cluster is a previously known, massive protostar over 30 times the mass of our sun.