The James Webb International Space Telescope has captured new images of an alien galaxy, and Messier 74 Also known as NGC 628 or “Ghost Galaxy”, Pseudonym due to the fact that the system is very difficult to monitor without professional equipment.
The images were published by the European Space Agency, the European Space Agency, on Monday morning (29).
In July, as evidenced by g 1And the The secrets of the spiral galaxy have already been revealed by a Spanish astronomerbut this time, Webb saw the massive star system in greater detail. (See image above).
And this time, two new images have been revealed: one made only with instruments from the Super Telescope and a composite of data from both Webb and its “big cousin,” the Hubble telescope, which shows the perfectly symmetrical galaxy in It is 32 million light-years away from Earth (See below for configuration).
Shown is the Webb and Hubble M74 data composite. – Photo: European Space Agency / Disclosure
According to the European Space Agency, precisely because of its special characteristics, such as its well-defined spiral arms, The galaxy is a favorite target for astronomers studying the origin and structure of these galactic formations.
“Webb’s sharp vision revealed minute filaments of gas and dust in the large spiral arms of the M74, which extend outward from the center of the image,” the agency said.
The agency further explains that by combining data from telescopes, scientists can get more information and never-before-seen details about astronomical objects, Increase the power of observation even for a super telescope like Webb.
An image of the same galaxy taken by the Hubble Telescope. Photo: NASA/Disclosure
Because M74 is perfectly symmetrical, the stars, gases, and all the dust that composes it line up in spiral arms that spread outward from this system.
Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who released the first glimpse of the ghost galaxy with Webb, explained to g 1 That if we could observe our Milky Way “from a spacecraft thousands of light years from Earth” we would have a similar view.
The colors are wrong but reveal never-before-seen structures
Also explained to g 1 The Brazilian astrophysicist Rojimar Rivel, who had nothing to do with these works, all astronomical images are “pseudo-colored”: since we cannot assign a direct color to this type of image, certain colors are chosen to highlight the structures of the astrological image.
“And this has happened even in earlier James Webb images, or even Hubble. It’s not something we notice with the naked eye. Filters that show, say, emission of gases, dust, and color images, are used in RGB, for example. But the color is always wrong. .sorry for the disappointment,” Riffel says with a laugh.
It is precisely these gases and dust clouds that appear in purple in the image below that give a unique feature to this galaxy far from us.
Formation of spiral galaxy M74 by astronomer Gabriel Brammer with data from James Webb. – Image: color composition: Gabriel Brammer (Cosmic Dawn Center, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen); Raw data: Janice Lee et al. The PHANGS-JWST Collaboration.
But since all this dust is a problem for telescopes that monitor visible light, [como na imagem do Hubble]And the The novelty that these Webb images bring is that we can now observe more dusty areas and all the structures hidden within these cosmic clouds.
“This is why the image is so different from the previous image, created with Hubble. Because Hubble works with visible light, what appears most are stars. Dust is the darkest band in the galaxy’s arms, because dust visually absorbs light,” she explains. Marina Bianchin, PhD student in physics at Santa Maria Federal University.
M74 image taken by the Spitzer Telescope. – Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/BEK Sugerman (STScI)
“We can see a wealth of detail in a web image,” Rifel says. “A well-defined signature of the spiral arms. It is in these arms that stars are formed.”
Rivel also explains that while Webb hasn’t been the first NASA space observatory that has been able to see this particular galaxy in infrared, since Spitzer’s retirement in January of last year, it also set a record (see picture above), The super telescope will be very useful for science to understand how stars form in regions of the universe hidden by these layers of dust.
“And understanding how stars are formed also means understanding how our planetary system and our sun are formed,” he says.
How does the web see the past? See the chart below
Why do we see the past when we look at the stars? – Photo: Art g1
(video: See the first images released by the James Webb Super Telescope.)
See the first images from the James Webb Super Telescope
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