Rice astronomers use Webb Telescope to discover 24 previously unseen young stars

Astronomer Megan Reiter and her team from Rice University used the James Webb Space Telescope to study a cluster of stars called NGC 3324, and have discovered two dozen previously unseen young stars about 7,500 light years from Earth.

According to a release by Rice University, findings were published in the December issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. They show what astronomers can expect to find with the Webb Telescope’s near-infrared camera. 

This camera has the ability to look through interstellar dust clouds that have previously prevented astronomers from seeing star-forming regions, particularly the ones that produce stars like the sun.

“What Webb gives us is a snapshot in time to see just how much star formation is going on in what may be a more typical corner of the universe that we haven’t been able to see before,” said Reiter in the Rice release.

Reiter is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy. She and her colleagues from the California Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, Queen Mary University in London, and the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, focused their attention on the Cosmic Cliffs, a star-forming region in NGC 3324.

NGC 3324 is in the constellation Carina. The release stated that many areas in the region could not be studied properly due to the dust in images from the Hubble Telescope.

The discovery of these jets is a significant step in the study of star formation, particularly in the accretion period of early star formation, which has been difficult for astronomers to study because it is fleeting. The jets only become visible when a protostar is actively accreting, which usually lasts only a few thousand years.