The James Webb Space Telescope set its sights on a galaxy 20 million light-years away, capturing a dazzling star-forming galaxy in images streaked with the signature of passing asteroids
A bright band in the upper left corner of the images shows the bright, bar-shaped center of the galaxy, according to a NASA news release. The NGC 5068 galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy, the same type as our home Milky Way. And the celestial body lies within the Virgo constellation, which is home to an enormous cluster of galaxies. These new snapshots of NGC 5068 add to a growing repository of data on areas of the observable universe where stars are born.
. The image most clearly shows the “dusty structure” of NGC 5068 and the orbs of gas that contain clusters of new stars, according to NASA. In this image, three asteroid trails are also easily discernible. The trails appear as mere dots, with one lying directly below the bar-shaped center of NGC 5068 and two more in the bottom-left corner, according to the space agency.
is the only Webb instrument that is sensitive to light in mid-infrared wavelengths, a type of wavelength that can only be observed by telescopes outside of Earth’s atmosphere. The other image captured by NIRCam shows the ghostly gas clouds from the image illuminated in bright red. The spectrum that the NIRCam instrument uses can see past obstructive elements such as gas and dust to clearly image the galaxy’s stars, according to NASA. “Dense and bright clouds of dust lie along the path of the spiral arms: These are H II regions, collections of hydrogen gas where new stars are forming,” the space agency said in a news release. “The young, energetic stars ionize the hydrogen around them, creating this glow represented in red.
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