Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2024

39 MAY-JUNE 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING T his image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) of star-form- ing region NGC 604 shows how stel- lar winds from bright, hot young stars carve out cavities in surround- ing gas and dust. The bright orange streaks in this image signify the presence of carbon-based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydro- carbons, or PAHs. As you travel fur- ther from the immediate cavities of dust where the star is forming, the deeper red signifies molecular hy- drogen. This cooler gas is a prime environment for star formation. Hy- drogen ionized by ultraviolet radia- tion appears as a white and blue ghostly glow. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI] T he formation of stars and the chaotic environments they in- habit is one of the most well- studied, but also mystery-shrouded, areas of cosmic investigation. The in- tricacies of these processes are now being unveiled like never before by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Two new images from Webb’s NIR- Cam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) show- case star-forming region NGC 604, located in the Triangulum galaxy (M33), 2.73 million light-years away from Earth. In these images, cav- ernous bubbles and stretched-out filaments of gas etch a more detailed and complete tapestry of star birth than seen in the past. Sheltered among NGC 604’s dusty envelopes of gas are more than 200 of the hottest, most massive kinds of stars, all in the early stages of their lives. These types of stars are B-types and O-types, the latter of which can be more than 100 times the mass of our own Sun. It’s quite rare to find this concentration of them in the nearby universe. In fact, there’s no similar region within our own Milky Way galaxy. This concentration of massive stars, combined with its relatively close