Webb, komşu bir galaksideki genç yıldız doğumevi N159’un içine bakıyor

A new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope shows N159, a star-forming region about 161,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy that orbits our own. N159 is an H II region: cold hydrogen clouds collapse under gravity and form new stars, many of them massive and hot, whose ultraviolet light ionises the surrounding gas, making it glow. Winds from these stars hollow out cavities and shape ridges, while dark red filaments of cool molecular hydrogen protect the newborn stars embedded within them. Younger than three million years, N159 is among the youngest nurseries in that galaxy. Because the Large Magellanic Cloud holds a smaller proportion of heavy elements than the Milky Way, its nurseries offer conditions closer to those of the early Universe. Using Webb data, astronomers spotted stars below a tenth of the Sun’s mass and found young stars more tightly packed in the western part of the region.