An image of the Tarantula Nebula captured by NASA’s Webb Space Telescope

Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy 161,000 light-years from Earth, the Tarantula Nebula, nicknamed the 30 Dorados, is “the largest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group of galaxies and the closest to our Milky Way. galaxy”. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The densest surrounding area of ​​the nebula resists erosion by the strong winds of the stars, forming a pillar that appears to point toward the cluster and holds the formation. protostar.

These protostars emerge from their “dusty cocoons” and help form nebulae. The Webb Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught a very young star doing just that, changing astronomers’ previous beliefs about the star.

According to NASA, “Astronomers had previously thought that the star may have been a little older and had already cleared the bubbles around it.” , showing that it still maintains an insulating cloud of dust around itself.

“Without Webb’s high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths, this episode of star formation would not have been revealed.”

Viewed through another Webb instrument that detects longer infrared wavelengths, thereby penetrating dust particles within the nebula, NASA said it revealed “a previously unseen space environment.”

The Tarantula Nebula has become a focus of astronomers studying star formation because it has a similar chemical structure to the cosmic noon giant star-forming region. At peak hours, according to NASA.

Because the star-forming region of our galaxy does not produce stars at the same rate as the Tarantula Nebula and has a different chemical composition, the Tarantula is the closest example of what happened in the universe when noon was reached.

The view of star formation in the Tarantula Nebula is just the latest discovery from NASA’s Webb telescope.

Webb launched last Christmas Day after decades of work to create the world’s largest and most sophisticated space telescope.