Webb’s Infrared Capabilities Pierce Through Dust Clouds to Make Rare Find Searching for buried treasure isn't easy. It can be a painstaking, even frustrating, process. It is common to sift through the proverbial sand for hours and hours and rarely hit the jackpot. However, with NASA’s James Webb Sp
Image of the Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera . This image shows invisible near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colors. Credit: Science: Megan Reiter , Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale , Anton M. Koekemoer Searching for buried treasure isn’t easy. It can be a painstaking, even frustrating, process.
This image separates out several wavelengths of light from the iconic First Image revealed on July 12, 2022, which highlight molecular hydrogen, a vital ingredient for star formation. Insets on the right-hand side highlight three regions of the Cosmic Cliffs with particularly active molecular hydrogen outflows.
The Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within the star cluster NGC 3324, has long intrigued astronomers as a hotbed for, many details of star formation in NGC 3324 remain hidden at visible-light wavelengths. Webb is perfectly primed to tease out these long-sought-after details since it is built to detect jets and outflows seen only in the infrared at high resolution.
Molecular hydrogen is a vital ingredient for making new stars and an excellent tracer of the early stages of their formation. As young stars gather material from the gas and dust that surround them, most also eject a fraction of that material back out again from their polar regions in jets and outflows. These jets then act like a snowplow, bulldozing into the surrounding environment. Visible in Webb’s observations is the molecular hydrogen getting swept up and excited by these jets.
Called the Cosmic Cliffs, the region is actually the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, roughly 7,600 light-years away. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image. The high-energy radiation from these stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away.
This period of very early star formation is especially difficult to capture because, for each individual star, it’s a relatively fleeting event – just a few thousand to 10,000 years amid a multi-million-year process of star formation.
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