James Telescope and Near-Infrared Camera Study of the Pillars of Creation: New Protostars at High Redshift
The James telescope is designed to see light invisible to people, and it can look through dust that obscures objects in Hubble images. The dust and gas in the Pillars of Creation are not as dense as James Webb’s eyes can see, and this will aid scientists in identifying stars and quantities of gas and dust.
Since Hubble first imaged the area in the 1990s, astronomers have returned to the scene several times. The William Herschel Telescope captured an image of the star birth area, and the Hubble created a follow-up image. The new instruments that look at the region give researchers new information.
Evaluating some of the dust in the region, the Near-Infrared Camera, also called NIRCAM, was used to give a new, closer look at the region.
The European Space Agency states that newly formed protostars are the scene-stealers. “When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.”
There are wavy lines on the edges of the pillars. There are ejections from stars that are still forming. Young stars shoot jets that can interact within clouds of gas and dust, according to a news release.
“This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water,” it reads. The young stars are only about a few hundred thousand years old, and will continue to form for millions of years.
First JAMES TWILIGHT: A Wide-Field Image of the Universe from the Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope
Webb is operated by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. The $10 billion space observatory, launched last December, has enough fuel to continue snapping unprecedented images of the cosmos for about 20 years.
Astronomers use the telescope to illuminate our solar system, and so far it has taken images of Mars, Jupiter and Neptune.
Banks is an astronomer and science communicator and she praised JAMES TWILIGHT for giving scientists more precise data to learn from about the formation of stars.
For more than two decades the telescope has suffered technical difficulties, cost overruns, delays and threats from Congress to kill it. Critics were skeptical of its large size, the primary mirror boasting six times more light collecting area than that of the Hubble.
The image represents just a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will be about four times larger. The simulation shows that the mosaic is even better than the scientists thought.
It is one of the first images of the universe that is medium-deep and wide-field, with the faintest objects visible.
“I was blown away by the first PEARLS images,” said study coauthor Rolf Jansen, research scientist at Arizona State University and a PEARLS coinvestigator, in a statement.
“Little did I know, when I selected this field near the North Ecliptic Pole, that it would yield such a treasure trove of distant galaxies, and that we would get direct clues about the processes by which galaxies assemble and grow, he said. I can see streams, tails, shells and halos of stars from their outskirts.
Researchers combined Webb data with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light captured by the Hubble Space Telescope to create the image. The light from both telescopes reveal a wealth of objects in the universe. Many of these distant galaxies have always eluded Hubble, as well as ground-based telescopes.
Measuring diffuse light in front of and behind the stars and galaxies in the image is like “encoding the history of the universe” because it tells a story of cosmic evolution, according to study coauthor Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.
With time, the field’s time-domain legacy, area covered, and depth can only get better, since it is designed to be observable every year.