Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2024

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 of our galaxy in unprecedented de- tail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. “There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sen- sitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” said the observation team’s principal investigator Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Char- lottesville. “Webb reveals an incred- ible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.” “The galactic center is the most ex- treme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test, ” added profes- sor Jonathan Tan, one of Crowe’s advisors at the University of Vir- ginia. Amid the estimated 500,000 Webb reveals new features in the heart of Milky Way T his image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center by NASA/ESA/CSA L. Ramsay & C. Pulliam