GALAXY PICS ARE STELLAR! !
Webb telescope images full of data, too
That’s out of this world! New snaps of outer space released Monday show the “mind-blowing” detail of 19 spiral galaxies near our Milky Way captured by the James Webb Space Telescope and thanks to the work of more than 150 astronomers across the globe.
The images of the spiral galaxies, similar to giant, bright pinwheels, offered a deeper guide into star formations, as well as galactic structure and evolution.
“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades.
“Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”
Lee and other scientists that are part of the project called PHANGS, or Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS, used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which showed about 100,000 star clusters and millions of individual stars.
The nearest galaxy photographed is about 15 million light years away from Earth, while the furthest is about 60 million light years from Earth.
The James Webb Space Telescope, building off the progress of the older Hubble Space Telescope, kicked off in 2021 and started scooping up data the following year.
The new images allowed researchers for the first time to sort out the structure of the clouds of dust and gas that shape stars and planets at a high level of detail in galaxies beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud — a pair of galactic satellites of the Milky Way.
“The images are not only aesthetically stunning, they also tell a story about the cycle of star formation and feedback, which is the energy and momentum released by young stars into the space between stars,” Lee said.
“It actually looks like there was explosive activity and clearing of the dust and gas on both cluster and kiloparsec (roughly 3,000 light years) scales,” Lee added.
“The dynamic process of the overall star formation cycle becomes obvious and qualitatively accessible.”