Researchers reveal photograph of cosmic “firework display” in nearby star cluster
A research team including a Keele astronomer have released a new picture of a cosmic “firework display” caused by stars in our galaxy interacting with their environment, taken with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Dr Nick Wright from Keele’s School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, is part of the team which has captured the images of Westerlund 1 – a so-called super star cluster with hundreds of very massive and potentially thousands of lower-mass young stars which is located across the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth.
The research, led by the Center of Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and INAF - Astronomical Observatory of Palermo in Italy, marks a major milestone in our ability to study the formation of the most massive stars and to better understand how they affect their environments.
The researchers used the JWST to observe Westerlund 1 with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The newly obtained images show many evolved, massive stars violently shedding their outer layers with bright patches throughout the image.
These extended structures are the ‘winds’ of these massive stars and show a surprising diversity in their shapes. The results provide details of the process where enormous amounts of energy from stellar winds and radiation are smashing into the local environment. This forms complex structures and stirs up the giant gas cloud, in which these stars are embedded.
Westerlund 1 is one of the closest and most massive star-forming clusters in our Galaxy, and it contains many rare supergiant and hypergiant stars, with masses ranging from eight to 100 times that of our Sun. Such stars live fast and die young with ages of only a few million years, which is in stark contrast to lower mass stars like our Sun that live for billions of years.
Dr Wright said: “Massive star clusters like Westerlund 1 represent some of most extreme star forming environments in the Universe. Images like this provide us with an unprecedented glimpse into the formation of the massive stars that dominate these clusters, as well as the lower-mass stars similar to our Sun that face the brunt of their extremely energetic outbursts.”
