The play of darkness and light in our galaxy’s crowded core is put on display like never before with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope capturing a detailed image of the Sagittarius C region near the Milky Way’s core. The image reveals a dense star-forming area with numerous protostars and infrared-dark clouds, offering new perspectives on star formation and the dynamics of our galaxy’s center.
The latest image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center 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*.
The image includes an estimated 500,000 stars of various ages, sizes, and colors, making it the hub of our Milky Way galaxy. The chaotic region at the galaxy’s center offers new mysteries and new features revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The image captured by the telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals a 50 light-years-wide portion of the Milky Way’s dense center, with an estimated 500,000 stars. It also showcases a vast region of ionized hydrogen wrapping around an infrared-dark cloud, which is so dense that it blocks the light from distant stars behind it.
Amid the estimated 500,000 stars in the image, there 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. The cloud the protostars are emerging from is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach Webb, making it appear less crowded when it is one of the most densely packed areas of the image.
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument also captured large-scale emission from ionized hydrogen surrounding the lower side of the dark cloud, showing cyan-colored in the image. This is the result of energetic photons being emitted by young massive stars, and the vast extent of the region shown by Webb is something that bears further investigation.
The galactic center is a tumultuous place where turbulent, magnetized gas clouds are forming stars, which impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation. The image from Webb provides a ton of data on this extreme environment, and researchers are just starting to delve into it.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s unprecedented infrared-light view of the Sagittarius C region near the Milky Way’s core is providing new insights into star formation and the dynamics of our galaxy’s center. As the world’s premier space science observatory, Webb is leading investigations in our solar system, exploring distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe. Webb is an international program led by NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.