Webb Telescope Captures Picture of "Space Tarantula"
The latest image captured by the Webb Space Telescope is one of its most dynamic yet. Tuesday morning, NASA officials shared a snapshot the observatory happened to snag of the Tarantula Nebula and it's a thing of beauty. The nebula's real name is 30 Doradus and can be seen in its fully glory, some 340 light-years across, in the picture birthing stars and galaxies within its cosmic dust.
"What makes this nebula so interesting to astronomers? Unlike in our Milky Way, the Tarantula Nebula is producing new stars at a furious rate," NASA said in a press release accompanying the photo. "Though close to us, it is similar to the gigantic star-forming regions from when the universe was only a few billion years old, and star formation was at its peak — a period known as 'cosmic noon.' Since the Tarantula is close to us, it is easy to study in detail to help us learn more about the universe's past."
"Despite humanity's thousands of years of stargazing, the star-formation process still holds many mysteries – many of them due to our previous inability to get crisp images of what was happening behind the thick clouds of stellar nurseries," the agency added in its release. "Webb has already begun revealing a universe never seen before, and is only getting started on rewriting the stellar creation story."
Since it was brought online for use earlier this summer, the Webb Space Telescope has taken pictures of the furthest reaches of space, areas of the cosmos that scientists have been unable to reach.
"If you think about that, this is farther than humanity has ever moved before," NASA administrator Bill Nelson previously said of the JWST. "And we're only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do. It's going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own."
"Our goals for Webb's first images and data are both to showcase the telescope's powerful instruments and to preview the science mission to come," astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at STScI, added of the images. "They are sure to deliver a long-awaited 'wow' for astronomers and the public."