The James Webb Space Telescope has found the candidates of the first young brown dwarfs outside the Milky Way galaxy, reported ESA on October 23 in an article.
NASA Webb shared this image in a post on X, quoting, “It’s giving rainbows and unicorns, like a middle school binder.”
It’s giving rainbows and unicorns, like a middle school binder 🦄🌈
Meet NGC 602, a young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, where astronomers using @NASAWebb have found candidates for the first brown dwarfs outside of our galaxy. https://t.co/jdupXcWiAH pic.twitter.com/v4FBxAzulj
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) October 23, 2024
The international team of astronomers, including Peter Zeidler, Elena Sabbi, Elena Manjavacas, and Antonella Nota, used the James Webb Space Telescope to find the candidates for the first young brown dwarf outside our Milky Way galaxy in a young star cluster named NGC 602.
The rich star cluster NGC 602 is located near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy roughly 200,000 light-years from Earth.
The star cluster is composed of materials that are similar to what existed in the early universe. The observations also show the existence of dark, dense dust clouds and ionized gas, which suggests the ongoing star formation processes, and thus NGC 602 provides a good opportunity to observe the star formation processes.
The data collected using the James Webb Space Telescope contains a detailed image of the NGC 602 captured from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The observations were made by the James Webb Space Telescope as part of the JWST GO program #2662 (PI: P. Zeidler) in April 2023.
The image shows the star clusters, young stellar objects, and gas and dust ridges. The image shows the capability of the James Webb space telescope to capture such star clusters in a detailed manner like it previously managed to capture the star cluster Westerlund 1.
About James Webb Space Telescope
| Project Name | James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) |
| Launch Date | December 25, 2021 |
| Mission Type | Infrared Space Observatory |
| Orbit | Halo Orbit around L2 (Second Lagrange Point) |
| Primary Mirror Diameter | 6.5 meters |
| Countries Involved | USA (NASA), Europe (ESA), Canada (CSA) |
| Website | Click Here |
What are brown dwarfs?
According to Wikipedia, Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that have more mass than the biggest gas giant planets but less than the least massive main-sequence stars. Their mass is approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter.
