Beautiful spiral galaxy 27 million light-years from Earth may offer key insights into star formation and help build an accurate model of the universe.
M51 as seen by NIRCam | Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo and the FEAST JWST team
“Stellar feedback” is the “outpouring of energy from stars into the environments which form them.” Scientists must form an accurate understanding of stellar feedback to build accurate models of star formation at the universal scale. Through FEAST’s observations of stellar nurseries outside the Milky Way, Webb provides novel views and understanding of the early stages of star formation and celestial light. Webb can also reveal critical details about the energy reprocessing of gas and dust in stellar nurseries.
Thanks to Webb’s unprecedented resolution, scientists are “seeing star clusters emerging from their natal cloud in galaxies beyond our local group for the first time.”FEAST observations also hope to help scientists accurately measure the time it takes for stars to “pollute with newly formed metals and to clean out the gas.” These timeframes differ across galaxies.
“By studying these processes, we will better understand how the star formation cycle and metal enrichment are regulated within galaxies as well as what are the time scales for planets and brown dwarfs to form. Once dust and gas is removed from the newly formed stars, there is no material left to form planets,” explains ESA.
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