by Recently released James Webb Space Telescope images of 19 distant galaxies shed new, dynamic and vibrant light on these beautiful realms. The trove of cosmic portraits taken by this $10 billion telescope reveal highly detailed, beautiful, face-to-face views of the spirals as seen from the instrument’s vantage point in space.
The astronomers were very excited about these JWST images when they were delivered because they emphasized that no two galaxies are the same when viewed with the kind of precision that the JWST can offer.
The observations, which are part of the Physics at High-Angle Resolution in Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) program, highlight in particular the structures of gas and dust within these galaxies, offering astronomers clues about how spiral galaxies form. with the Milky Way of stars.
“The new JWST images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in a statement. “They are fascinating even to researchers who have studied these same galaxies for many years. Bubbles and filaments are resolved to the smallest scales ever observed and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”
Related: A nearby star factory seen in a James Webb Space Telescope photo
The images show bright orange dust lanes, captured with JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
The same instrument also captured stars that are still forming, enveloped in envelopes of gas and dust from which they are gathering mass. These envelopes can be seen as red “seeds” on the tops of dust lanes.
“These are the places where we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” Erik Rosolowsky, professor of physics at the University of Alberta, said in the statement.
This feature of the newly imaged spiral galaxies is particularly prominent in the image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300, located 69 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.
Millions of more mature stars are seen in the images as bright blue jewels shining through orange lanes of gas and dust, captured by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Some of these blue stars are clustered together, while others are spread out through their home galaxies.
These hot blue stars are clearly visible in the JWST PHANGS image of the spiral galaxy NGC 7496, which is 24 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Grus.
To the surprise of astronomers examining these spiral galaxies imaged by JWST, the powerful space telescope spotted several voids within lanes of gas and dust.
“These holes could have been created by one or more stars exploding, carving out huge holes in the interstellar material,” Adam Leroy, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, said in the statement.
One of the galaxies imaged by the JWST as part of the PHANGS program, NGC 5068, located 20 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, appears to be dominated by these large voids.
Of course, one of the most striking features of any spiral galaxy is the “arms” that shoot out from the core of the tightly packed stars to form the iconic spiral. By tracking these arms, astronomers can find extended regions of glowing gas and dust.
“These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky explained. “We think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.”
As dense clouds of gas and dust collapse to form new stars, studying these structures in detail could provide important information about how intense starbursts are triggered, fueled and sustained, and then stopped in galaxies .
Arguably, these spiral arms have never looked more dynamic and vivid than in the new JWST image of NGC 628, a spiral galaxy located 32 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. In the image, the galaxy’s arms appear to be spritzing gas and dust like a bright orange splash of spray paint.
In addition, some of the galaxies seen by the JWST as part of this observing program show pink-and-red diffraction spikes scattered throughout their central region.
“This is a clear indication that an active supermassive black hole might exist,” Eva Schinnerer, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in the statement. “Or, the star clusters towards the center are so bright that they saturate that area of the image.”
This can be seen in the JWST image of NGC 1365, located 56 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Fornax.
One thing that can be seen from these 19 spiral galaxy images is that galaxies appear to grow from the inside out, meaning that star birth begins at the galaxy’s core and then radiates out through the arms those spirals.
This means that the further from the center of a galaxy the more likely it is to be relatively young with ancient stars mostly gathered at the core of galaxies.
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“I feel like our team is living in a constant state of being overwhelmed – in a positive way – by the amount of detail in these images,” homas Williams, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, said in the statement.
The full catalog of new JWST spiral galaxy images is available here.
