Seeing Sagittarius C in a New Light

A star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is seen in exceptional detail in this image from Nov. 20, 2023, thanks to the Near-Infrared Camera instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sgr C region, along with some never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia)

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Monika Luabeya

NASA OSBP Celebrates Small Business Saturday 2023

A Journey of Support and Community Impact

Small Business Saturday is an annual holiday that encourages shoppers to support local businesses. Taking place on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, it stands as a dedicated day to celebrate and rally support for the contributions small businesses make to their communities. This year, amid the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the emphasis on supporting small businesses is more crucial than ever as they navigate and adapt to evolving circumstances.

The History and Evolution:

As of 2013, communities actively embraced the holiday, expressing solidarity by pledging support for their local businesses and organizations.

The timeline of Small Business Saturday is marked by the following key milestones:

• 2010: Small Business Saturday was launched
• 2011: The U.S. Senate unanimously passes a resolution endorsing the day
• 2013: Over 1400 individuals become “Neighborhood Champions,” organizing local events
• 2015: The Small Business Administration (SBA) becomes a co-sponsor of Small Business Saturday
• 2020: Americans set a record by spending $19.8 billion on Small Business Saturday
• 2021: Shoppers surpass the previous year’s record, contributing over $20 billion

Today, Small Business Saturday has the unwavering support from private sectors, the SBA, and Women Impacting Public Policy (WIPP), and NASA.

For small business owners, their enterprises transcend mere commercial endeavors — they are extensions of their identities. Supporting local businesses in your community not only ensures their survival but also fosters thriving communities, establishing a symbiotic relationship between these businesses and the people they serve. This year, Small Business Saturday is on November 25, 2023. 

Historically, the NASA Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) has celebrated this annual holiday by launching a Small Business Saturday Campaign. Now, in 2023, NASA OSBP developed a comprehensive Small Business Saturday Digital Toolkit. This toolkit comprises of digital posters and a virtual background designed to serve as a call-to-action for small business program specialists to integrate it into meetings for a whole week. Our outreach extended beyond the toolkit, urging followers to embrace the theme of “Shop, Support and Sustain!” We invited everyone to display their support by shopping small and tagging us in their posts on social media.

We continue to invite all individuals to help to make this movement a success! Keep an eye out for our upcoming social media posts, where we will be sharing informative strategy guides and an engaging Small Biz Bingo game. Your participation is key to amplifying the impact of this movement, and we look forward to having you on board for another year of supporting and celebrating local businesses.

NASA OSBP is dedicated to championing and uplifting local businesses making an impact on Small Business Saturday and beyond!

Editor: Maliya Malik, NASA Office of Small Business Programs Intern

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Garrett Shea

NASA to Highlight Inclusion During Bayou Classic Event 

NASA is bringing a clear message to the 50th Annual Bayou Classic Friday, Nov. 24 and Saturday, Nov. 25 – while exploring the universe for the benefit of all, it is equally invested in ensuring the participation of all in the agency and its discovery work.

The commitment will be on full display during NASA’s outreach and engagement activities at the Bayou Classic weekend in New Orleans. “Our message is simple – there’s space for everybody at NASA,” said Pamela Covington, Office of Communications director at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, which is leading the agency’s Bayou Classic planning. “We need everyone involved if we hope to accomplish our shared mission and truly benefit all humanity.”

The annual Bayou Classic event, which features a football game and a spirited Battle of the Bands, typically attracts more than 200,000 students and supporters from two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) – Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Grambling State University in Grambling, Louisiana – to New Orleans.

In addition to signage and social media messaging, NASA Stennis representatives will be on hand during Fan Fest activities Nov. 25 to interact and visit with event participants. Alumni and others will staff a NASA booth at Champions Square next to the Caesars Superdome from 9 a.m. CDT to 12 p.m., to talk about their career paths with the agency and to promote current internship and employment opportunities for minority students and others.

The outreach and engagement effort is part of an agencywide commitment to advance equity and reach deeper into underrepresented and underserved segments of society and is in support of the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to advance racial equity in the federal government. NASA’s 2022 Equity Plan outlines the agency’s efforts to increase participation in areas such as procurements and contracts, as well as grants and cooperative agreements. The agency also is working to eliminate visible and invisible barriers to full participation, and to increase NASA outreach to underserved communities. The agency is scheduled to update the plan and its progress by year’s end.

Frontline evidence of the agency’s commitment to inclusion also is seen in its plan to return humans, including the first woman and the first person of color, to the Moon through Artemis missions, powered by NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. That is just one aspect of the agency’s across-the-board diversity work.

The NASA Minority University Research and Education Project is another example. Through the initiative, NASA provides financial awards to minority-serving institutions, including HBCUs, to assist faculty and students alike in STEM-related research efforts. The initiative also focuses on providing internship opportunities and career paths for minority members.

NASA also has launched a Science Mission Directorate Bridge Program to develop partnerships with underserved institutions such as HBCUs and to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within the agency. The primary focus is to help transition science and engineering students from undergraduate studies into graduate schools and/or employment by NASA or related institutions.

Along the same lines, a new NASA Space Tech Catalyst Prize seeks to recognize individuals and/or organizations that share effective best practices on ways to engage underrepresented and diverse space technology innovators, researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs. The initiative is built on the premise that diversity leads to greater innovation, research, and mission success.

Social Media

Stay connected with the mission on social media, and let people know you’re following it on X, Facebook, and Instagram using the hashtags #Artemis, #BayouClassic50, #NASA_HBCUs. Follow and tag these accounts:

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NASA’s Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of Milky Way

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NASA’s Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of Milky Way

The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.

Image: Sagitarius C (NIRCam)

“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” said the observation team’s principal investigator Samuel Crowe, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.”

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,” added professor Jonathan Tan, one of Crowe’s advisors at the University of Virginia.

Protostars

Amid the estimated 500,000 stars in the image is a cluster of protostars – stars that are still forming and gaining mass – producing outflows that glow like a bonfire in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. At the heart of this young cluster is a previously known, massive protostar over 30 times the mass of our Sun. The cloud the protostars are emerging from is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach Webb, making it appear less crowded when in fact it is one of the most densely packed areas of the image. Smaller infrared-dark clouds dot the image, looking like holes in the starfield. That’s where future stars are forming.

Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument also captured large-scale emission from ionized hydrogen surrounding the lower side of the dark cloud, shown cyan-colored in the image. Typically, Crowe says, this is the result of energetic photons being emitted by young massive stars, but the vast extent of the region shown by Webb is something of a surprise that bears further investigation. Another feature of the region that Crowe plans to examine further is the needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen, which appear oriented chaotically in many directions.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” said Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

Image: Sagitarius C Features

Around 25,000 light-years from Earth, the galactic center is close enough to study individual stars with the Webb telescope, allowing astronomers to gather unprecedented information on how stars form, and how this process may depend on the cosmic environment, especially compared to other regions of the galaxy. For example, are more massive stars formed in the center of the Milky Way, as opposed to the edges of its spiral arms?

“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”

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 the Canadian Space Agency.

Media Contacts

Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro– rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s  Goddard Space Flight Center, , Greenbelt, Md.

Leah Ramsay lramsay@stsci.edu , Christine Pulliam cpulliam@stsci.edu

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

Downloads

Download full resolution images for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Related Information

Star Formation

Piercing the Dark Birthplaces of Massive Stars with Webb

Our Milky Way

Webb Mission – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/

Webb News – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/latestnews/

Webb Images – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/multimedia/images/

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steve sabia

Minority Serving Institution Partners

Coppin State University

Coppin State University (CSU) is a public, historically black university located in Baltimore, Maryland. It is part of the University System of Maryland. CSU is a model urban, residential liberal arts university located in the northwest section of the City of Baltimore that provides academic programs in the arts and sciences, teacher education, nursing, graduate studies, and continuing education. As an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Coppin has a culturally rich history as an institution providing quality educational programs and community outreach services. Coppin offers 53 majors and nine graduate-degree programs. A fully accredited institution, Coppin serves Baltimore residents as well as students from around the world, with flexible course schedules that include convenient day, evening, and weekend classes and distance learning courses. 

Hampton University

Hampton University (HU), a private, non-profit, non-sectarian, co-educational institution that was founded 1868 in Hampton, Virginia. It is a Historically Black College University (HBCU) dedicated to the promotion of learning, character building, and preparation of promising students for the positions of leadership and service. The HU Department of Atmospheric and Planetary Science (APS) provides a program in graduate education leading to the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees with concentration either in Atmospheric Sciences or in Planetary Sciences.

Howard University

Howard University is a private, federally chartered, historically black university in Washington, D.C. The university has a highly productive and well-reputed graduate Program in Atmospheric Sciences (HUPAS) that has trained 50% of African Americans and 30% of Latinx with PhDs in Atmospheric Sciences in the US over the last decade. This interdisciplinary program was established in 1998 as a cooperative effort between the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and Mechanical Engineering. The University leads the NOAA Cooperative Science Center in Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology (NCAS-M), which is a 13-member academic and research consortium of international reputation that supports NOAA mission science in atmospheric sciences, weather, and climate. 

Morgan State University

Morgan State University (MSU) is a public, historically black research university in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the largest of Maryland’s HBCUs. Morgan attracts students from each state and many foreign countries. It is one of the leading institutions nationally in the number of applications received from African-American high school graduates. The University awards more bachelor’s degrees to African-American students than any campus in Maryland. In many fields, but particularly in engineering and the sciences, Morgan accounts for large percentages of degrees received by African-Americans from Maryland institutions. An above-average percentage of Morgan graduates enter graduate and professional school. Historically, the university has ranked among the top public campuses nationally in the number of black graduates receiving doctorates. 

University of Maryland Baltimore County

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university in Baltimore County, Maryland. UMBC is a designated Minority Serving Institution: an AANAPISI (Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANPISI) with 59 baccalaureate, 24 post-baccalaureate certificate, 39 masters, and 24 doctoral degree programs. Student enrollment in 2018 was approximately 11260 undergraduate and 2507 are in graduate or professional programs. Demographically, 45% of the undergraduate students are minority (Asian American, African American, and Hispanic). UMBC’s vision is to redefine “… excellence in higher education through an inclusive culture that connects innovative teaching and learning, research across disciplines, and civic engagement.” (See: https://diversity.umbc.edu/)

University of Maryland Eastern Shore

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) is a Historically Black 1890 Land-Grant Institution. UMES has five schools, one of which is the School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences (SANS). The Department of Natural Sciences (DNS) within the SANS offers M.S. degrees in Chemistry and Biology, Professional Science Master’s degree in Quantitative Fisheries and Resource Economics, and a five-year combined BS/MS degree in Marine Science. It also offers M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Science with specializations in Fisheries Science, Oceanography, Ecology, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, and Environmental Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and M.S./Ph.D. degree in Toxicology. At the undergraduate level, DNS offers Bachelor of Science degrees in Biology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Environmental Science (with concentrations in marine science, and environmental chemistry), and minor programs in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. The University offers the only four year Aviation Science Bachelor’s degree program in the state of Maryland, with concentrations in Aviation Electronics, Aviation Management, Aviation Software, and Professional Pilot. 

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Milan Loiacono