The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a shocking image of a distant barred spiral galaxy as astronomers aim to check star birth within the deeper regions of space.
JWST observed the galaxy NGC 5068, situated 17 million light-years away within the constellation Virgo, as a part of its mission to construct what the European Space Agency (ESA) calls a “treasure trove” of star formation observations in relatively nearby galaxies.
This repository could help scientists higher understand the processes of star formation and, thus, how barred spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way evolve.
Related: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — A whole guide
The portrait of NGC 5068 shows tendrils of gas and stars stretching throughout the barred spiral galaxy. The intense and dense central bar of the galaxy, which sets it other than “non-barred” spiral galaxies, may be seen within the upper left-hand corner of the image.
These large central bars will not be solid objects but are as a substitute product of tightly clustered stars, and the stellar bars possessed by galaxies like NGC 5068 may indicate they’re older and more evolved than unbarred spiral galaxies. It is because these structures are believed to take around 2 billion years to form.
As this bar of stars swirls, astronomers think it could pull gas and dirt to the middle of those galaxies, where it acts because the fuel for intense bursts of star formation. The motion of the bar in NGC 5068 appears to be causing stars to form in a spiral-like shape. These thick clouds of gas and dirt that collapse to create stars also block visible light, making opaque star-forming regions difficult to check, at the very least in visible light wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
JWST is the best instrument to look through these clouds because infrared light passes through dust and gas mostly unimpeded, and the powerful space telescope that launched on Christmas Day in 2021 is designed to see the universe in infrared.
This image of NGC 5068, a galaxy that has a diameter of at the very least 45,000 light-years and is seen face-on from Earth, was created using two of the JWST’s primary instruments Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) and the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) each attuned to different wavelengths of infrared light.
To this point, JWST has collected images of 19 relatively nearby star-birthing galaxies, which astronomers should give you the chance to mix with a wealth of observations from other space-based telescopes and ground-based observatories to raised understand star formation. These include Hubble Space Telescope images of over 10,000-star clusters, spectroscopic mapping of around 20,000 clusters, observations of star-forming emission nebulas from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and imaging of 12,000 dark and dense molecular clouds identified by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).
Combined, these observations give astronomers an image across a large spread of the electromagnetic spectrum, potentially exposing intimately the characteristics of star formation.
