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From NASA/ESA, January 17, 2023: With our powers combined 😎 Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with the Webb telescope to create a new stunning composite image of the Tarantula Nebula. Chandra's X-rays (shown in royal blue and purple) identify extremely hot gas and supernova explosion remnants, while Webb reveals forming baby stars.
Unlike most nebulas in our Milky Way, the Tarantula Nebula has a chemical composition similar to that of conditions in our galaxy several billion years ago — when star formation was at its peak. For astronomers, this nebula is the perfect window into how stars formed in our galaxy in the distant past.
Image description: Composite image of the Tarantula Nebula: Royal blue and purple gas clouds interact with red and orange gas clouds, as specks of light and large gleaming stars peek through. The blue and purple patches represent X-ray data from Chandra. The most striking blue cloud is shaped like an upward pointing triangle at the center. Wispy white clouds outline this blue triangle. Inside this frame is a gleaming star with six long, thin spikes. Beside it is a cluster of smaller bright blue specks showing young stars in the nebula. Darker X-ray clouds can be found near the right and left edges of the image. The red and orange gas clouds, which look like roiling fire, represent infrared data from Webb.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./L. Townsley et al.; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JWST ERO Production Team
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From NASA/ ESA, January 16, 2023: A host of astronomical objects throng this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Background galaxies ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals are strewn across the image, and bright foreground stars much closer to home are also present, surrounded by diffraction spikes. In the centre of the image, the vague shape of the small galaxy UGC 7983 appears as a hazy cloud of light. UGC 7983 is around 30 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, and is a dwarf irregular galaxy — a type thought to be similar to the very earliest galaxies in the Universe.
This image also conceals an astronomical interloper. A minor asteroid, only a handful of kilometres across, can be seen streaking across the upper left-hand side of this image. The trail of the asteroid is visible as four streaks of light separated by small gaps. These streaks of light represent the four separate exposures that were combined to create this image, the small gaps between each observation being necessary to change the filters inside Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Capturing an asteroid was a fortunate side effect of a larger effort to observe every known galaxy close to the Milky Way. When this project was first proposed, roughly 75% of all the Milky Way’s near galactic neighbours had been imaged by Hubble. A group of astronomers proposed using the gaps between longer Hubble observations to capture images of the remaining 25%. The project was an elegantly efficient way to fill out some gaps not only in Hubble's observing schedule, but also in our knowledge of nearby galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully
