04:49 PM Wednesday 31 January 2024
NASA has published 19 unprecedented images sent by the James Webb Space Telescope that shed new, vibrant light on these wonderful worlds.
A treasure trove of new cosmic images reveals incredibly detailed and stunning views of spiral galaxies, which has excited astronomers because it confirms that no galaxies are the same. The images also focus on gas and dust structures within these galaxies similar to our Milky Way.
“The new images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are extraordinary,” Janice Lee, a Strategic Initiatives project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement. “They are astonishing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. They tell a story about a cycle.” Star formation.
James Webb took pictures of stars that are still forming, covered by an envelope of gas and dust from which mass collects. These coatings can be seen as red “seeds” on the tops of dirt paths.
“This is where we can find the newest and most massive stars in galaxies,” Eric Rozolovsky, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta, said in the statement.
Millions of more mature stars appear in the images as bright blue gems shining through orange lanes of gas and dust.
To the astonishment of astronomers who examined these spiral galaxies, several voids appeared within the lanes of gas and dust. “These holes may have been formed as a result of one or more stars exploding, creating giant holes in interstellar material,” said Adam Leroy, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University.
One of the most striking features of any spiral galaxy is the “arms” that radiate from the central core of stars densely packed together to form a distinctive vortex. By tracking these arms, astronomers can find extended regions of glowing gas and dust.
Because dense clouds of gas and dust collapse to form new stars, studying these structures in detail can provide key information about how intense explosions stimulate, maintain, and then stop star formation in galaxies.
One thing that’s clear from these 19 images of spiral galaxies is that they appear to grow from the inside out, meaning that star birth begins in the cores of galaxies and then radiates outward through those spiral arms.
The farther a star is from the core of a galaxy, the more likely it is to be relatively young, as old stars are often clustered in the cores of galaxies.
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