NASA reveals a fascinating new image from 200,000 light-years away – and it holds a dark secret

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NASA is using the James Webb Space Telescope to look at one of the Milky Way’s closest neighbors.

The tiny galaxy nestles within a nebula some 200,000 light-years from Earth — and could be home to one of astronomers’ biggest unanswered questions.

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James Webb Space Telescope T616XM observing a distant star (3D illustration, elements of this image were provided by NASA) Credit: Alamy

Scientists are using the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to determine how our universe originated.

In the neighboring galaxy, known as NGC 346, scientists are using telescopes to understand how the universe’s oldest stars formed, more than 10 billion years ago.

NGC 346 is a star cluster within the nebula referred to as the Small Magellanic Cloud.

The galaxy, which appears to lack minerals heavier than hydrogen and helium, is thick with about 33,000 young stars.

Metal levels in the galaxy indicate that this is what the universe was like in its early history, when it was generating stars left, right and center.

Using JWST’s infrared camera, astronomers have found “ribbons of gas and dust” within the galaxy.

Researchers believe this is early evidence that although the galaxy is low in metals, it is dusty – and thus has the building blocks for forming rocky planetary systems.

Some small, high-mass stars, known to astronomers as young stellar objects (YSOs), have formed over the past million years.

Astronomers will observe these young stars to find out how the oldest stars in the universe were born.

“We were very excited to see dust around these things,” said Margaret Mixner, an astronomer with the Universities Space Research Consortium and one of the study’s authors.

“We’ve just scratched the surface of this data.”

However, researchers still have a long way to go.

It is not known whether there is enough dust that survived the star formation process to help form rocky planetary systems in a “metal-poor” galaxy.

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