More like a creepy psychedelic from a Marvel movie than a spiral galaxy familiar shape from the visual telescopesnew The James Webb Space Telescope The image shows the dusty skeleton of the distant galaxy NGC 628.
“This is a galaxy that probably looks like our own Milky Way,” said astronomer Gabriel Brammer of the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. shared the photo on Twitter He said on Monday Independent in the interview. “You can see all these knots where individual stars formed, individual supernovae went out, and really study it in detail.”
The spiral arms of NGC 628 have been imaged before, but the galaxy was imaged in visible light. Hubble Space Telescope Don’t look like the purple spiral structure seen in Webb’s mid-infrared image.
Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 628 that looks like our own Milky Way galaxy.
(Nasa)
“You look at this galaxy with Hubble or ground-based telescopes,” said Dr. Brammer, “you see blue stars, you see red stars, you see spiral arms, you see dust lanes.”
He said these dust lanes, reddish-brown threads in the spiral arms, block stars in visible images taken by Webb and other telescopes.
“In the mid-infrared, what you actually see is the opposite, the dust is no longer absorbed; we’re actually directly observing the glowing dust itself now, because the dust itself is spreading,” said Dr Brammer. “We’re actually seeing more gas and dust in this galaxy than stars.”
A mid-infrared image of the galaxy NGC 628 taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 17
(Color composite, Gabriel Brammer (Cosmic Dawn Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen); raw data, Janice Lee et al. and PHANGS-JWST collaboration.)
Webb photographed NGC 628 on July 17 and sent it back to Earth. Barbara Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, (MAST), where data is available to anyone, including the public. Dr. Brammer actually studies very distant galaxies in his work rather than relatively nearby galaxies like NGC 628, but when he saw the raw image in the data Monday morning, he knew he wanted to colorize the image and share it.
“That was the first thing that really came up,” he said. “The moment I opened it on my screen, it really blew me away.”
while NASA the top five made a big show, revealing a full-color Webb image on July 12According to Dr. Brammer, the telescope has been almost idle since then and is continuously taking pictures and uploading them to the MAST archive. These are extremely exciting times for astronomers who have been waiting more than 20 years for a chance to see what Webb can do.”
“We’ve been waiting for Webb in some cases for decades now, and we’ve all been staying up for the last week and looking at as many different Webb pictures as we can,” Dr Brammer said. “It’s all really great.”
