Webb telescope captures stunning images of the Orion nebula

The James Webb space telescope captured the first images of the Orion nebula, leaving astronomers “impressed”, an international research team revealed on Monday.

It is a wall of dust and dense gas that resembles an enormous winged creature, its mouth lit by a bright star as it flies through cosmic filaments.

The nebula is located in the constellation of Orion, 1,350 light-years from Earth, in a similar environment in which our own solar system was born more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Astronomers are interested in the region to better understand what happened during the first million years of our planetary evolution.

The images were obtained as part of the Early Release Science program and involve more than 100 scientists from 18 countries, with institutions including the French National Center for Scientific Research, Western University of Canada and the University of Michigan.

“We are amazed at the impressive images of the Orion Nebula,” said Els Peeters, an astrophysicist at Western University, in a statement. “These new observations allow us to better understand how massive stars transform the cloud of gas and dust from which they are born,” he added.

Nebulae are often obscured by large amounts of dust that were impossible to see with visible-light telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s predecessor.

However, Webb mainly operates in the infrared spectrum, which penetrates dust. This allowed the discovery of several spectacular structures, up to a distance of 40 astronomical units or the size of our solar system. This includes dense filaments of matter, which can generate new generations of stars, as well as star systems that consist of a central protostar surrounded by a disk of dust and gas in which planets form.

“We hope to better understand the complete cycle of star birth,” said Edwin Bergin, chairman of astronomy at the University of Michigan and a member of the research team. “In this image, we observe this cycle where the first generation of stars radiates material to the next generation. The incredible structures we observe will detail how the feedback loop of star birth occurs in our galaxy and beyond.”

Webb is the most powerful space telescope ever built, with a 6.5-meter primary mirror made up of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments and a tennis court-sized five-layer sunscreen.