In the middle of a cloud of new and young stars, a group of astronomers made up, among others, of researchers belonging to the Department of Astronomy UdeC and researchers from the Center for Astrophysics and Related Technologies – CATA, Rodrigo Herrera-Camus and Vicente Villanueva, achieved observe the explosive birth of new stars in the galaxy called Messier 82 (M82) located 12 million light years away from the constellation “Ursa Major”.
This galaxy is special as it hosts strong star formation activity. Compared to our Milky Way galaxy, M82 forms new stars 10 times faster.
While previous observations with NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes already revealed intense star formation in M82, it was only thanks to the power of the James Webb telescope that we can now learn in detail what is happening at the center of this galaxy.
According to the data obtained during the first year of observation with the Webb telescope, Rodrigo Herrera-Camus, co-author of the publication and who contributed to the data analysis, pointed out that “many stars are forming in the center of the galaxy that, By exploding as supernovae, they are expelling interstellar gas and dust at hundreds of kilometers per second out of it.”
“After characterizing these galactic winds, the next step will be to understand how these young star clusters are capable of generating these winds. Once we have all the pieces together, we will be able to create a model to understand how galaxies evolve over time,” he indicated.
The infrared camera of the James Webb telescope revealed a level of detail to such an extent that concentrations of iron can be distinguished, which, for the most part, would be the remains of supernovae, or spots that reveal molecular hydrogen which is illuminated by the radiation from a nearby young star in formation.
Without a doubt this detail of information shows the power of Webb, since each point observed is the image of a star or a star cluster. “The novelty of all this is that we can investigate in much more detail how galactic winds expel material out of the galaxy. This is key, because this material serves as fuel to form new stars. If this material is no longer present in the disk, the galaxy will stop forming new stars and will enter a very slow phase of evolution. This is what we know as the death of a galaxy,” said Herrera-Camus.
I walk forward
Webb’s observations of M82 raise more questions about star formation and galaxy evolution, which await answers with additional data currently being collected by the telescope, including information on another galaxy with bursts of star formation, called NGC 253.
In the near future, observations with multiple telescopes, as well as large-scale images of both the galaxy and the galactic wind, will be obtained and analyzed. These data will help astronomers determine how explosive episodes of star formation and the galactic winds they generate transform the evolution of galaxies.