WASHINGTON D.C. — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured new images on Monday showing a “treasure trove” of 19 spiral galaxies near the Milky Way.
These images range in distance between 15-60 million light years away from Earth. Researchers have been analyzing the new images and found out how galaxies are organized.
Nasa says that these Webb images are part of a large, long-standing project, the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) program.
Researchers found that “stars, gas and dust on the smallest scales ever observed beyond our own galaxy,” a Milky way, NASA said.
According to researchers, the telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) data highlights glowing dust, showing where it exists around and between stars. It also shows stars that haven’t yet fully formed.
Those specific starts are still encased in the gas and dust that feed their growth. “These holes may have been created by one or more stars that exploded, carving out giant holes in the interstellar material,” explained Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
Now, if you look at the spiral arms that are red and orange, “we think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust,” Rosolowsky added.
Along with stars, these images show black holes. A pink-and-red diffraction is a clear sign that there may be an active supermassive black hole,” said Eva Schinnerer, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
Now even if you don’t have much knowledge about space, these images are still revolutionary to look at. Nothing to this scale has been captured before and releases new areas of space that we have not researched.
“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “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.”
For more information about the James Webb Space Telescope and to see what research is being done, go to NASA’s website.
