Sharmila is a Seattle-based science journalist. She found her love for astronomy in Carl Sagan's The Pale Blue Dot and has been hooked ever since. She holds an MA in Journalism from Northeastern University and has been a contributing writer for Astronomy Magazine since 2017. Follow her on Twitter at @Sharmilakg.
so dense with gas and dust that visible light from background stars fails to penetrate them.
Clouds like Chameleon I are stellar nurseries; their collapse over time forms stars and potentially rocky planetary systems. The chemical composition of these systems and any building blocks of life they may contain, however, is determined by the ices embedded deep inside the molecular cloud. Now, thanks to Webb's powerful instruments, including its deep-penetrating near-infrared camera , astronomers have probed into Chameleon I's dusty heart and discovered ices at their early stages of evolution — just before the cloud's core collapses to form protostars.
The team used light from two background stars, NIR38 and J110621, to light up Chameleon I in infrared wavelengths. The cloud's different molecules that are locked in ices absorb starlight in different infrared wavelengths. Astronomers then studied the chemical fingerprints that showed up as dips in the resulting spectral data. This data helped the team identify how much of which molecules are present in Chameleon I.
"This is the first time researchers have been able to study the composition of so-called pre-stellar ices near the center of a molecular cloud," Melissa McClure, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the lead author of the study, said in a second
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