A gorgeous new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a bustling region of star formation at the distant edge of the Milky Way. Called, dramatically enough, the Extreme Outer Galaxy, this region is located 58,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy, which is more than twice the distance from the center than Earth is.
Scientists were able to use Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments to capture the region in sparkling detail, showing molecular clouds called Digel Clouds 1 and 2 containing clumps of hydrogen, which enables the formation of new stars.
“In the past, we knew about these star forming regions but were not able to delve into their properties,” said lead researcher Natsuko Izumi of Gifu University in a statement. “The Webb data builds upon what we have incrementally gathered over the years from prior observations with different telescopes and observatories. We can get very powerful and impressive images of these clouds with Webb. In the case of Digel Cloud 2, I did not expect to see such active star formation and spectacular jets.”
Though these clouds are part of the Milky Way, they contain few heavy elements like metals and instead much more hydrogen and helium. That makes them more similar to small dwarf galaxies, or to how the Milky Way may have looked when it was in its early stage of forming. So these regions are great places to study star formation to get clues about how stars formed in the early universe — and their distinctive features, like the jets of material that these young stars throw off at tremendous speeds.
“We know from studying other nearby star-forming regions that as stars form during their early life phase, they start emitting jets of material at their poles,” explained fellow researcher Mike Ressler of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “What was fascinating and astounding to me from the Webb data is that there are multiple jets shooting out in all different directions from this cluster of stars. It’s a little bit like a firecracker, where you see things shooting this way and that.”
The researchers intend to take more data from distant regions of the Milky Way to understand how stars form in these conditions, which are quite different from those elsewhere.
“I’m interested in continuing to study how star formation is occurring in these regions. By combining data from different observatories and telescopes, we can examine each stage in the evolution process,” Izumi said. “We also plan to investigate circumstellar disks within the Extreme Outer Galaxy. We still don’t know why their lifetimes are shorter than in star-forming regions much closer to us. And of course, I’d like to understand the kinematics of the jets we detected in Cloud 2S.”
The research is published in the Astronomical Journal.