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Arnaud Prost | Sky, Sea, Space | ESA Explores #12
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NASA astronaut Christopher Williams poses for a portrait at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.Credit: NASA NASA astronaut Chris Williams will embark on his first mission to the International Space Station, serving as a flight engineer and Expedition 74 crew member.
Williams will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft in November, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
During his expedition, Williams will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations that help prepare humans for future space missions and benefit humanity.
Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Williams graduated with the 23rd astronaut class in 2024. He began training for his first space station flight assignment immediately after completing initial astronaut candidate training.
Williams was born in New York City, and considers Potomac, Maryland, his hometown. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Stanford University in California and a doctorate in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where his research focused on astrophysics. Williams completed Medical Physics Residency training at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He was working as a clinical physicist and researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston when he was selected as an astronaut.
For more than two decades, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is able to more fully focus its resources on deep space missions to the Moon and Mars.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
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Last Updated Apr 03, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
What are the dangers of going to space?
For human spaceflight, the first thing I think about is the astronauts actually strapping themselves to a rocket. And if that isn’t dangerous enough, once they launch and they’re out into space in deep exploration, we have to worry about radiation.
Radiation is coming at them from all directions. From the Sun, we have solar particles. We have galactic cosmic rays that are all over in the universe. And those cause damage to DNA. On Earth here, we use sunscreen to protect us from DNA damage. Our astronauts are protected from the shielding that’s around them in the space vehicles.
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There are many risks associated with human space exploration. NASA has been planning for these missions to make our astronauts return home safely.
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Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read NASA Webb Explores Effect of Strong Magnetic Fields on Star Formation
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Full image below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.
“A big question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been, if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars form in such clouds, why are so few stars born here?” said astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the principal investigators. “Now, for the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales.”
Detailed study of stars in this crowded, dusty region has been limited, but Webb’s advanced near-infrared instruments have allowed astronomers to see through the clouds to study young stars like never before.
“The extreme environment of the galactic center is a fascinating place to put star formation theories to the test, and the infrared capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provide the opportunity to build on past important observations from ground-based telescopes like ALMA and MeerKAT,” said Samuel Crowe, another principal investigator on the research, a senior undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a 2025 Rhodes Scholar.
Bally and Crowe each led a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Image A: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb)
An image of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope) radio telescope array puts the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of the Sagittarius C region in context. Like a super-long exposure photograph, MeerKAT shows the bubble-like remnants of supernovas that exploded over millennia, capturing the dynamic nature of the Milky Way’s chaotic core. At the center of the MeerKAT image the region surrounding the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole blazes bright. Huge vertical filamentary structures echo those captured on a smaller scale by Webb in Sagittarius C’s blue-green hydrogen cloud. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Image B: Milky Way Center (MeerKAT and Webb), Labeled
The star-forming region Sagittarius C, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is about 200 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. The spectral index at the lower left shows how color was assigned to the radio data to create the image. On the negative end, there is non-thermal emission, stimulated by electrons spiraling around magnetic field lines. On the positive side, thermal emission is coming from hot, ionized plasma. For Webb, color is assigned by shifting the infrared spectrum to visible light colors. The shortest infrared wavelengths are bluer, and the longer wavelengths appear more red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crowe (UVA), John Bally (CU), Ruben Fedriani (IAA-CSIC), Ian Heywood (Oxford) Using Infrared to Reveal Forming Stars
In Sagittarius C’s brightest cluster, the researchers confirmed the tentative finding from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) that two massive stars are forming there. Along with infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) mission, as well as the Herschel Space Observatory, they used Webb to determine that each of the massive protostars is already more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. Webb also revealed the bright outflows powered by each protostar.
Even more challenging is finding low-mass protostars, still shrouded in cocoons of cosmic dust. Researchers compared Webb’s data with ALMA’s past observations to identify five likely low-mass protostar candidates.
The team also identified 88 features that appear to be shocked hydrogen gas, where material being blasted out in jets from young stars impacts the surrounding gas cloud. Analysis of these features led to the discovery of a new star-forming cloud, distinct from the main Sagittarius C cloud, hosting at least two protostars powering their own jets.
“Outflows from forming stars in Sagittarius C have been hinted at in past observations, but this is the first time we’ve been able to confirm them in infrared light. It’s very exciting to see, because there is still a lot we don’t know about star formation, especially in the Central Molecular Zone, and it’s so important to how the universe works,” said Crowe.
Magnetic Fields and Star Formation
Webb’s 2023 image of Sagittarius C showed dozens of distinctive filaments in a region of hot hydrogen plasma surrounding the main star-forming cloud. New analysis by Bally and his team has led them to hypothesize that the filaments are shaped by magnetic fields, which have also been observed in the past by the ground-based observatories ALMA and MeerKAT (formerly the Karoo Array Telescope).
“The motion of gas swirling in the extreme tidal forces of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, can stretch and amplify the surrounding magnetic fields. Those fields, in turn, are shaping the plasma in Sagittarius C,” said Bally.
The researchers think that the magnetic forces in the galactic center may be strong enough to keep the plasma from spreading, instead confining it into the concentrated filaments seen in the Webb image. These strong magnetic fields may also resist the gravity that would typically cause dense clouds of gas and dust to collapse and forge stars, explaining Sagittarius C’s lower-than-expected star formation rate.
“This is an exciting area for future research, as the influence of strong magnetic fields, in the center of our galaxy or other galaxies, on stellar ecology has not been fully considered,” said Crowe.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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View/Download the science paper led by Crowe from the The Astrophysical Journal.
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Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Leah Ramsay – lramsay@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
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