Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He's the author of 'The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence' (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.
planetary system of seven worlds orbiting an M-dwarf 40 light-years away is a key target of the JWST. Preliminary results, which failed to detect thick blankets of hydrogen surrounding some of the TRAPPIST-1 worlds, were released during a conference held at STScI in December, but we'll have to be patient for more comprehensive results from these planets, of which up to four could reside in their star's habitable zone.
Longmore is leading a study to use JWST to observe frantic star formation in a region at the center of our own, called the central molecular zone, some 26,000 light-years from us. The center of our galaxy hosts the highest concentration of stars, and at our distance they all appear packed in — indistinguishable to the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope — while copious amounts of dust shroud most of them from view in optical light.
The star-forming Pillars of Creation, imaged in mid-infrared by the JWST in what will surely become an iconic picture.It's taking longer to gather all the data from the center of the galaxy, but that's because it's such a complex environment, with bright, diffuse emission everywhere, and all that has to be disentangled from the relevant signal of star formation via determined and careful data processing.
, at least in the local universe. Was this still the case over 13 billion years ago in the first galaxies? Answering that question could help explain both how galaxies formed and what ended the universe's dark ages.
"One possible explanation is that they're producing too many high-mass stars, that they have a top-heavy IMF," Longmore said, noting the importance of measuring the IMF in the central molecular zone to understand stellar masses in young neighborhoods.
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