NASA on Monday released a series of surprising images of 19 nearby spiral galaxies. Please take a look.
NASA is right: “It’s very easy to become fascinated” by recent images of spiral galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).Each image It contains “well-defined arms” of galaxies, each “filled with stars” and sometimes even “active supermassive black holes.”
of image They are part of the Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) program, run by more than 150 astronomers around the world. Although the program predates his JWST, the software onboard the next spacecraft will allow researchers to see the surrounding sky more clearly.
Go ahead and try these out.
Webb published highly detailed images of 19 spiral galaxies. These observations add new near- and mid-infrared puzzle pieces to the PHANGS program, a global astronomy project. https://t.co/TBNbkzUJ7p pic.twitter.com/ioYKrQPW6W
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 29, 2024
“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” Space Telescope Science Institute project scientist Janice Lee told NASA. “Even for researchers who have been studying these galaxies for decades, they are surprising. The bubbles and filaments have been resolved to the smallest scale ever observed and tell a story about the star formation cycle. Tell you.”
🤩✨ NASA/ESA/CSA James #webb The space telescope has discovered a treasure trove of 19 spiral galaxies.
This new set of sophisticated images shows stars, gas, and dust at the smallest scale ever observed beyond our galaxy.
To see all images 👉 https://t.co/lqV9ThtVUZ pic.twitter.com/C0ckUesTNg
— ESA (@esa) January 29, 2024
New galaxy images from the James Webb Space Telescope – A combination of more than a dozen photos from both NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. Here are some of Webb’s latest infrared views showing the structure of spiral galaxies. https://t.co/NnWhmnOLB8 pic.twitter.com/OoUi5rPKZq
— Atlantic Photo (@TheAtlPhoto) January 30, 2024
Although we know more about space than we technically know about the oceans, there is something endlessly mysterious about the cosmic realm around us. It’s easy for most scientists to point to something in the universe and explain it, but much of what we think we know is still based on theory. (Related: Recovered meteorite could be alien technology, claims Harvard astrophysicist)
I can’t wait to see how these cosmological theories evolve over the rest of our short lifetimes. Let’s hope something doesn’t storm through our solar system and throw us back into the Dark Ages before we understand what’s really going on there.
