NASA released a breathtaking photo of NGC 346 on social media, and the netizens were blown away by it.
NASA Shares Photo Of NGC 346 Captured By JWST
On Wednesday, the agency uploaded a new photo of NGC 346 taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on Instagram. According to NASA, NGC 346 is one of the most dynamic-star forming regions in the nearby galaxies, and it is the only massive cluster.
Astronomers study NGC 364 because it is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy near Milky Way. The conditions and amount of metals in SMC are similar to those in galaxies billions of years ago in an era known as "cosmic noon" when star formation was at its peak. Galaxies began generating stars rapidly about 2 to 3 billion years after the big bang. The galaxies we see around us today are still shaped by the star formation fireworks that occurred then.
According to Margaret Meixner, an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association and principal investigator of the research team, a galaxy from cosmic noon doesn't have one NGC 346 but thousands of it, NASA reported. However, NCG 346 is the lone cluster left, and they want to study it because it will offer them a great opportunity to investigate the conditions at cosmic noon.
James Webb Space Telescope Enables Probing of NGC 364 to Lighter-Weight Protostars
Researchers can determine whether the star formation process in the SMC differs from what we see in Milky Way by looking at protostars still forming. Protostars with masses greater than 5 to 8 times that of the Sun were the main subject of earlier infrared observations of NGC 346.
However, with the use of the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers can now investigate lighter-weight protostars, even those as small as one-tenth of the Sun, and check if the metal content influences the formation process, according to Olivia Jones of the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, Royal Observatory Edinburgh, a co-investigator on the program.
As stars develop, they absorb gas and dust from the surrounding molecular cloud, which can appear as ribbons in Webb images. A disk of accretion receives the material and nourishes the core protostar. Within NGC 346, astronomers have discovered gas around protostars, but Webb's near-infrared studies are the first to reveal dust in these disks.
According to Guido De Marchi of the European Space Agency, a co-investigator on the study team, they see building blocks not just of stars but likely of planets. Since SMS has a similar environment to galaxies during cosmic noon, there are chances that rocky planets have formed earlier in the universe than expected, he added.
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