Unprecedented images of the Milky Way's core

New images of the core of the Milky Way

The stunning image shows more than 50,000 stars and turbulent clouds at the center, or core, of our Milky Way Galaxy. This is a region about 300 light-years from the supermassive black hole and 25,000 light-years from Earth.

While astronomers have long known about the region's features, the new image may finally provide answers to the mysteries of the violent environment at the Milky Way's core.

"There has never been infrared data from this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity that we have now obtained from the James Webb Space Telescope," said lead investigator Samuel Crowe, a graduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "So we are seeing many features of the Milky Way's core for the first time."

"The James Webb Space Telescope reveals stunning detail, allowing us to study star formation in the environment in a way never before possible," said Crowe.

The image above was captured using JWST's infrared camera, NIRCam, which detects light from the oldest stars and galaxies in the process of forming, stellar communities in neighboring galaxies, young stars in the Milky Way, and objects in the Kuiper Belt.

Thanks to the James Webb telescope, the team of experts can also study individual stars at the center of the Milky Way, allowing them to learn how they form and how the environment influences this process.

For example, they discovered a previously unknown stellar embryo with a mass 30 times that of the Sun, which the team hopes will help answer why the center of the Milky Way produces more massive stars than its spiral structure would suggest.

Massive stars are where heavy elements are produced in their cores, so understanding these objects contributes to our understanding of the origin story of much of the universe.

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