Steph Deschamps / September 1, 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured new details of a galaxy in a spectacular image showing its spiral shape released by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Nasa.
Launched into space at the end of 2021 and operational since July, James Webb has since revealed impressive images of Jupiter, nebulae and other distant galaxies, providing scientists with a wealth of new data to analyze.
The one released Monday shows M74, or the Ghost Galaxy, its bright blue core and impeccable spiral, observed by the MIRI instrument, which studies the mid-infrared and is the result of a collaboration between Europeans and Americans.
Webb's keen eye revealed fine filaments of gas and dust in the bright, spiral-shaped arms that spread out from the center of this image, notes ESA on its website, which points out that the galaxy had already been observed by the mythical Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and still in operation.
The European agency, which co-developed the telescope with NASA, also notes that a lack of gas allows a clearer view of the stars in the center of the galaxy, located about 32 million light years away in the constellation of Pisces.
The data collected will allow astronomers to identify regions of the galaxy where stars are forming, measure with finesse the mass and age of star clusters and better understand the nature of small grains of dust drifting in interstellar space,notes the ESA.
The James Webb Telescope, a $10 billion engineering jewel, conducts its observations 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
It has, for the first time, detected the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, i.e. a planet outside our solar system, researchers announced last week.