Written by Amira Shehata Friday, March 1, 2024 12:00 AM Changed infrared vision For the James Webb Space Telescope Our view of a large, barred spiral galaxy, revealing its dust skeleton illuminated by the glow of young stars. Visible-light images of NGC 1559, such as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show a glowing swirl of light with bright young star clusters spread across spiral arms decorated with lanes of dust. the black.
According to the “space” website, its infrared vision revealed the inner parts of the galaxy, and JWST’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) sees starlight filtering through opaque dust in addition to the glow of ionized hydrogen gas in star-forming regions.
Meanwhile, the space telescope’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) was able to directly observe the dust, picking up clouds of tiny particles produced by previous generations of stars and tracking the spiral structure of NGC 1559.
New galaxy
The new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of NGC 1559 is of scientific value, and was produced as part of the PHANGS project to better understand how stars are born, how they live and how they die in all types of galaxies across the universe.
PHANGS is also interested in learning more about the interaction between those stars and clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy, as well as how they together affect the overall large-scale structure of the galaxy.
The project, led by an international team of astronomers, is mapping these galaxies across the electromagnetic spectrum, using not only the James Webb Space Telescope, but also a host of other powerful observatories.
The list includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Atacama Compact Array (ACA) in Chile, the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes in the United States, the Meerkat radio telescope in the south, and the extended Northern Millimeter Array ( NOEMA) in France.
