File:Where Are New Stars Born? NASA’s Webb Telescope Will Investigate (51146269419).png

When it comes to making new stars, the party is almost over in the present-day universe. In fact, it’s been nearly over for billions of years. Our Milky Way continues to form the equivalent of one Sun every year. But in the past, that rate was up to 100 times greater. So if we really want to understand how stars like our Sun formed in the universe, we need to look billions of years into the past.

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope as a sort of time machine, a team of researchers intends to do just that. Led by principal investigator Jane Rigby of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-principal investigator Joaquin Vieira of the University of Illinois, Champaign, the team will take advantage of natural, cosmic telescopes called gravitational lenses. These large celestial objects will magnify the light from distant galaxies that are at or near the peak of star formation.

Read more: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/where-are-new-stars-bor...

Image: This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of galaxy SDSS J1226+2152, which is being magnified and distorted by the immense gravity of a galaxy cluster in front of it. It is one of four distant, star-forming galaxies the TEMPLATES team will study with Webb. The team chose it as an example of a galaxy that is not very dusty.