James Webb Telescope, NASA's latest space telescope, has taken some stunning pictures of our early universe since it was placed in orbit. It is the biggest optical telescope in orbit, and its excellent resolution and sensitivity mean it can see objects that are too ancient, far, or dim for the Hubble Space Telescope.
To learn more about star formation in the early cosmos, scientists might look for local analogues. Because of this, the NGC 346 was studied by NASA's James Webb telescope, which uncovered previously unseen regions of star formation.
The Small Magellanic Cloud, our nearest dwarf galaxy, is home to NGC 346. Its makeup is more similar to that of early universe galaxies, when star creation was at its height. NGC 346 has the potential to provide light on the conditions under which stars formed in distant galaxies.
Inside a nebula, there is a grouping of stars. Gas arcs in the colours orange and pink create a boat-like structure in the image's centre. These arcs are oriented such that one end points to the top right and the other to the bottom left of the picture. There is another column of gas, this time in shades of orange and pink, rising from the image's centre to its upper left. White stars form a big cluster to the right of this plume. The scene is filled with numerous white stars and galaxies of varying sizes.
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Webb can detect protostars (baby stars) considerably fainter than any previous telescope. For the first time ever, the telescope has been able to make out dust in the gas discs around those protostars. Webb is essentially seeing the raw material from which stars and maybe planets are created. This might help us figure out whether rocky planets really developed sooner in the cosmos than we had previously believed.
