The James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen details at the center of the Milky Way

This newest image shows a specific part of space near the center of our galaxy. The region is known as Sagittarius C and is located about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Webb’s team explains that it is a particularly dense region of space, and this image shows it in unprecedented detail.

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our galaxy, the Milky Way,” Professor Jonathan Tan explained in the post detailing the image. Current theories about star formation can be tested “with maximum precision” in regions like Sagittarius C, Tan says.

Webb’s photo of the center of the Milky Way is also unusual, even from a non-scientific point of view. The image shows bright colors where the star forming region is located in space. The region Webb imaged is so densely packed with stars that Webb’s team estimates there are at least 500,000 stars in this single image.

Webb’s observations of the center of the Milky Way will greatly help us understand whether our theories about star formation are correct or whether they need to be changed in some way. This is one of the space telescope’s greatest strengths, because it is able to help us see whether the models on which we base our understanding of the universe actually hold up.

The galactic center is about 25,000 light-years from Earth, close enough for Webb to be able to study individual stars in great detail, giving us more data to work with. It will be interesting to see what information other scientists can extract from this image and Webb’s subsequent observations.

The text was originally published in the print edition of Expresso das Ilhas No. 1147 of November 22, 2023.