WASHINGTON — A newly released series of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope show 19 spiral galaxies relatively close to the Milky Way in stunning detail, showing signs of star formation and galaxy structure. and provide new clues about evolution.
The image was released on Monday by a team of scientists working at several major observatories on a project called Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS).
The closest of the 19 galaxies is called NGC5068 and is approximately 15 million light years away from Earth. The most distant galaxy is NGC1365, about 60 million light-years from Earth.
One light year is the distance that light travels in one year, which is 5.9 trillion miles.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched in 2021 and began collecting data in 2022, taking incredible pictures of the universe while reshaping our understanding of the early universe.
Orbiting observatories primarily observe the universe using infrared light.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and remains operational today, primarily examining space telescopes at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Spiral galaxies, which resemble giant windmills, are a common type of galaxy. Our Milky Way is one.
The new observations come from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
It shows approximately 100,000 star clusters and millions, or perhaps billions, of individual stars.
“These data are important as they provide new insight into the early stages of star formation,” said Thomas Williams, an astronomer at the University of Oxford who led the data processing team for the images.
“Stars are born deep within dusty clouds that completely block out the visible wavelengths of light that the Hubble Space Telescope can detect, but these clouds glow at JWST wavelengths. We don’t know much about this stage. “We don’t really know how long it lasts, so these data will be essential to understanding how stars in our galaxy start life,” Williams added. Ta.
About half of spiral galaxies have straight structures called bars that emanate from the center of the galaxy to which spiral arms are attached.
“A common belief is that galaxies form from the inside out, growing larger and larger over their lifetimes. Spiral arms act to sweep up star-forming gas, and the spiral arms “acts to funnel the same gas toward the black hole at the center of the galaxy,” Williams said.
This image allows scientists to discover the dust and gas where stars and planets form in galaxies beyond the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (two galaxies thought to be satellites of a sprawling galaxy). For the first time, we were able to elucidate the structure of clouds at a high level of detail. milky way.
Astronomer Janice Lee of the Space Telescope Science Institute said: “This image is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also provides insight into star formation and feedback, the cycles of energy and momentum that young stars release into the interstellar space. It’s telling,” he said. Principal investigator on new data from Baltimore.
“In fact, there appears to have been explosive activity and removal of dust and gas at both the cluster and kiloparsec (about 3,000 light-year) scales. It reveals the dynamic processes of the entire star formation cycle, and the general “It becomes qualitatively more accessible to people, making the images more convincing on many levels,” Lee added.
Webb’s observations are based on Hubble’s observations.
“Hubble allows us to see starlight from galaxies, but some of the light is blocked by the galaxy’s dust,” said Eric Rosolowski, an astronomer at the University of Alberta. “This limitation has made it difficult to understand some of how galaxies behave as systems. Webb’s infrared vision allows us to see through this dust and see behind and behind the encrusted dust. You can see the stars inside.”
