(click on image to enlarge)
“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” said Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “They’re mind blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured millions of stars in these images. Older stars appear blue here, and are clustered at the galaxies’ cores.
The telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) observations highlight glowing dust, showing where it exists around and between stars – appearing in shades of red and orange. Stars that haven’t yet fully formed and are encased in gas and dust appear bright red.
Webb’s high-resolution images are the first to show large, spherical shells in the gas and dust in such exquisite detail. These holes may have been created by stars that exploded and carved out giant regions in the interstellar material.
Another eye-catching detail? Several galaxy cores are awash in pink-and-red diffraction spikes. These are clear signs that these galaxies may have central active supermassive black holes or central star clusters.
These spiral galaxies are Webb’s first big batch of contributions to the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) program, that includes existing images and data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). With Webb’s images, researchers can now examine these galaxies in ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and radio light.
Explore side-by-side images of Webb and Hubble’s views of these 19 galaxies.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team
Designer: Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)
