This MIRI image from JWST data shows the central portion of the star-forming region N79, which is now known to house a super star cluster known as H72.97–69.39: just the fourth super star cluster ever found within our Local Group. It is also the youngest known, with an estimated age of just 65,000 years, with MIRI probing the structure of neutral, cool matter, rather than the stars and protostars themselves. (Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner)
There are only four super star clusters in all the Local Group: rarities today. Here’s what the youngest, the just-discovered N79, shows us.
All throughout cosmic history, star-formation has illuminated the darkness of deep space.
Looking at the same region of space in three different wavelengths of light, a short-wavelength infrared view, a long-wavelength infrared view, and a narrowband view at a wavelength of 1.87 microns, reveals many different features within the same region of the Orion Nebula. The bright, glowing features at long wavelengths of light indicate large amounts of modestly cool neutral matter, pointing to star-formation still being ongoing in those regions. Actively star-forming regions create not only singlet stellar systems like our own, but also binary, trinary, and even richer multi-star systems as well. (Credit: M.J. McCaughrean & S.G. Pearson, A&A submitted, 2023; Animation by E. Siegel)
For more than 13 billion years, our Universe has been fully reionized: transparent to starlight.
For the first 550 million years of the Universe, neutral, light-blocking atoms persist ubiquitously in the space between galaxies, continuing what’s known as the cosmic dark ages. Once the last of that neutral matter becomes reionized, starlight can propagate freely through the Universe, marking the end of the reionization epoch. In some locations, reionization happens earlier or later than average, but by the time the Universe is ~800 million years old, it should be fully reionized. (Credit: M. Alvarez, R. Kaehler, and T. Abel)
An artistic representation of a starburst galaxy, where the entire galaxy itself behaves as a star-forming region, using data from the FIRE (Feedback in Realistic Environments) simulation that includes strong bursts of star-formation. For the first ~3 billion years of cosmic history, the star-formation rate rose and rose until reaching a peak, but has fallen off significantly in the ~10–11 billion years since. Whether starburst galaxies become red-and-dead or will form new stars later on depends on factors we have not yet fully understood, especially at early times. (Credit: Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern, CIERA + IT-RCDS)
Instead of today’s modern small star-forming regions, giant ones were the norm 6+ billion years ago.
