NASA's newest high-end space telescope will soon cast its gaze toward a place where thousands of young stars are born.
The space agency is reportedly preparing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb for short) to examine newly-formed stars located in the inner region of the Orion Nebula to provide experts a proper understanding of stars and their planetary systems in the very earliest stages, per the Webb Space Telescope website.
NASA's latest high-end space telescope is currently going through the last of its commissioning procedures for it to be used for science, with its first pictures being scheduled for publication on July 12.
NASA's Baby Star Nursery Study Facts
NASA, through the Webb Space Telescope website, mentioned that it will be using the JWST to study the stellar nursery called the Trapezium Cluster, situated within the inner region of the Orion Nebula.
The Cluster is home to more than a thousand young stars, which are put into a space where they are only four light-years apart - the same distance between our sun to our system's nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri.
A light-year is about six trillion miles or 9 trillion kilometers.
The Cluster and the stars within will be studied by a team led by Mark McCaughrean, the Webb Interdisciplinary Scientist for Star Formation.
They will be singling out three "interesting phenomena" in the Cluster: the distribution of the masses of "young objects" within it, the earliest phases of planet formation around the clusters of young stars, and the material ejected by many of the young stars in jets and outflows.
These planned studies are part of a Guaranteed Time Observations program granted to McCaughrean due to his role as a Webb Interdisciplinary Scientist.
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The young objects the study will observe are called brown dwarfs, which are objects formed like stars but with insufficient material to have the temperatures and pressures needed to fuse hydrogen.
McCaughrean mentioned that the Cluster is where many very young stars that are around a million years old are gathered, and that a million years may not seem very young to a human being.
However, he added that when put into the proper context, a million-year-old star is merely a four-day-old baby compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old sun, per Space.com.
He also explained that NASA chose the Orion Nebula because it is the nearest region of massive star formation to the sun.
"There are places closer to the sun that have young, low-mass stars, but there are none closer that have both big stars and the very smallest objects," McCaughrean said.
Why Use The JWST?
NASA wants to use the JWST as it has the instruments needed to study the stars and objects within the Trapezium Cluster.
The space agency said that the stars within the Cluster are surrounded by the gas and dust that made them, absorbing visible wavelength light and effectively hiding them from NASA's other telescopes. However, infrared can get through the gas and dust due to them having a long wavelength.
Additionally, the stars and brown dwarfs are young and still forming, they do not produce that much heat, making them dim and hard to spot.
Despite that, they instead emit infrared light which the TWST can use to observe them and send data to experts on Earth clearly in a way no ground-based telescope can.
Furthermore, by comparing Webb's images to Hubble's, McCaughrean and his team will learn about the dust's composition, which will help them understand the very earliest phases of planet formation.
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