NASA's Webb telescope shares jaw-dropping photo of the heart of our own galaxy

NASA has revealed never-before-seen features within one of the biggest star-forming regions in the galaxy, Sagittarius C, which is located approximately 300 light-years from the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

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The space agency has taken to its website to explain that thanks to Webb's highly sensitive infrared instruments, the observatory is able to cut through dense regions of dust and gas, revealing never-before-seen details that lead researchers to understand more about the evolution of the universe. Additionally, Webb being able to see directly into the heart of our galaxy enables astronomers to test their theories of star evolution in the most intense star-forming regions in the galaxy.

NASA writes in its blog and on its social media channels that the above image contains an estimated 500,000 stars, and among these stars are clusters of proto-stars, or stars that are still in the process of gaining mass. Sagittarius C is located approximately 25,000 light-years from Earth, and NASA has highlighted specific regions of the image that astronomers have identified.

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"There's never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity 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 Charlottesville. "Webb reveals an incredible 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 a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation," said Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain. "Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it."