NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope took an image of the Sagittarius C star nursery in the center of the Milky Way in 2023, followed up on it, revealing the jets of the original star that are still forming, and gain an in-depth understanding of the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gases and star life cycles.
“A big problem in the central molecular region of the Milky Way is that if there are so many dense gases and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars are formed in such clouds, why are there so few stars born here?” John Barry, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the chief researchers, said. Now, for the first time, we can directly see that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in inhibiting star formation, even on a small scale.
Detailed research on this crowded, dusty area of stars has been limited, but Weber’s advanced near-infrared instruments have enabled astronomers to study young stars through the clouds in an unprecedented way.
“The extreme environment in the center of the Milky Way is a fascinating place to test the theory of star formation, and the infrared function of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides us with an opportunity to conduct further research on the basis of important ground-based observations of telescopes such as ALMA and MeerKAT in the past,” Samuel Crowe, another chief researcher of the study, a senior undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a Rhodes scholar in 2025, said.
Bally and Crowe each hosted and published a paper in the Journal of Astrophysics.
Picture A: Center of the Milky Way (MeerKAT and Webb) NASA Webb Telescope explores the effects of strong magnetic fields on stars
NASA Webb Telescope explores the effects of strong magnetic fields on stars
Images of the Milky Way taken by the MeerKAT (formerly the Caro Array Telescope) radio telescope arrays are set in the background images of the Sagittarius C region from the James Webb Space Telescope. Like an ultra-long exposure photo, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovae that have exploded for thousands of years, capturing the dynamic characteristics of the chaotic core of the Milky Way. In the center of the MeerKAT image, the area around the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way sparkles. The huge vertical filamentary structure echoes the smaller structure that Weber photographed in the blue-green hydrogen cloud in Sagittarius C. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Cow Jin)
Picture B: The Center of the Milky Way (MeerKAT and Webb), has been marked NASA’s Webb telescope to explore the effects of strong magnetic fields on stars
NASA Webb Telescope explores the effects of strong magnetic fields on stars
The star formation region Sagittarius C photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope is about 200 light-years away from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in the center of the Milky Way. The spectral index at the bottom left shows how to assign color to radio data to create images. At the negative end, there is non-thermal radiation, which is stimulated by electrons rotating around the magnetic field line. At the positive end, thermal radiation comes from thermal ionized plasma. For Weber, color is distributed by converting the infrared spectrum into visible light color. The shortest infrared wavelength is bluer, while the longer wavelength looks redder. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Cow Jin)
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