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Peering Into the Tendrils of NGC 604 with NASA's Webb

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March 09, 2024 3:30PM (EST)Release ID: 2024-110
At the center of the image is a nebula on the black background of space. The nebula is comprised of clumpy, red, filamentary clouds. At the center-right of the red clouds is a large cavernous bubble, and at the center of the bubble there is an opaque blueish glow with speckles of stars. At the edges of the bubble, the dust is white. There are thousands of stars that fill the surrounding area outside the nebula, most of them are yellow or white. There are also some smaller, red stars and a few disk-shaped galaxies scattered across the image.

Summary

Unique opportunity to study high concentration of massive, young stars nearby

In the astronomy field, the term “nearby” is quite relative. Neighboring galaxies to our home galaxy, the Milky Way, are a few million light-years away. In contrast, some of the most distant galaxies ever detected, closer to the Big Bang, are billions of light-years away. In some cases, the ability to study nearby objects at an extremely high resolution can help astronomers better understand more distant objects.

Take star-forming region NGC 604 as one example. Located 2.73 million light-years away in the nearby Triangulum galaxy, this region is similar to familiar starbirth regions in our Milky Way galaxy, such as the Orion Nebula, but it is much larger in extent and contains many more recently formed stars. Such regions are small-scale versions of more distant “starburst” galaxies, which underwent an extremely high rate of star formation.

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Full Article

The formation of stars and the chaotic environments they inhabit is one of the most well-studied, but also mystery-shrouded, areas of cosmic investigation. The intricacies of these processes are now being unveiled like never before by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Two new images from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) showcase star-forming region NGC 604, located in the Triangulum galaxy (M33), 2.73 million light-years away from Earth. In these images, cavernous bubbles and stretched-out filaments of gas etch a more detailed and complete ...

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News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-03127. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

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