NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shows heart of Milky Way in unprecedented details

James Webb Space Telescope has taken the latest picture of the dense centre of our galaxy showing stunning and unprecedented details. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in its report published on Monday (Nov 20) said that 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*. Notably, Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. 

As quoted by NASA, the observation team's principal investigator Samuel Crowe, who is an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said: "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." 

Crowe further added that "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". 

Professor Jonathan Tan, who is one of Crowe's advisors at the University of Virginia, said: "The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test." 

Also read: NASA probe aboard Psyche mission sends message from nearly 10 million miles away in space 

Also read: Deep Impact? A 'lost asteroid' could strike Earth in 2024, NASA estimates show 

NASA's report stated that in the estimated 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars, which are still forming and gaining mass. The process produced outflows that glow in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. 

NASA said that "at the heart of this young cluster is a previously known, massive protostar over 30 times the mass of our Sun". 

"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 in fact it is one of the most densely packed areas of the image," said NASA.