NASA today released a new image of the center of the Milky Way taken by the Webb Space Telescope (20MB full-resolution original image), showing a very gorgeous space picture.According to the official introduction, there are about 500,000 stars shining in the Sagittarius C (SgrC) region in the picture, and it also shows some previously unknown features.
The central region contains a cluster of "protostars," or stars in the process of forming, producing outflows that glow like bonfires in the infrared dark cloud.
At the center of this young star cluster is a previously known massive protostar, with a mass more than 30 times that of the Sun.
Webb's NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) instrument also captured the massive emission of ionized hydrogen surrounding the lower side of the dark cloud, shown as cyan in the image.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy (a type of spiral galaxy) where the solar system is located. It is an elliptical disk with a huge disk structure. The latest research shows that the Milky Way has four clear and fairly symmetrical spiral arms. The spiral arms are 4,500 light-years apart, and the total number of stars is between 100 billion and 400 billion.
The total mass of the Milky Way is about 1.5 trillion times the mass of the Sun, and the age of the Milky Way is about 10 billion years old.