The James Webb Telescope shows star formation in Virgo – T3N – Digital Pioneers

JWST considered the constellation Virgo. (Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Space Agency and CSA can easily see through dust and gases with their infrared instruments. Therefore, JWST can show images that we couldn’t see before.

The latest image shows the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, named for the bright central bar in the upper left of the image. The Webb image is a combination of infrared images taken by the telescope’s MIRI (mid-infrared instrument) and NIRCam (near-infrared camera) sensors.

The JWST easily sees through dust and gas, (Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee)

They dedicated themselves to the galaxy in Virgo. It is about 17 million light-years from Earth. Due to the special capabilities of JWST, we can see images that show the process of star formation.

A look at the two frames that make up the composite shows different layers of the galaxy. how gizmodo The glowing gas bubbles have been reported to be newly formed stars.

A faint network of dust and bright star clusters runs across the JWST image, revealing a dusty spiral galaxy structure. The glowing gas bubbles, which contain newly formed star clusters, can be seen well.

This image of NGC 5068 becomes part of a set of observations of star formation in nearby galaxies. These observations are valuable to astronomers for two reasons. On the other hand, star formation forms the basis for many areas of astronomy.

By observing star formation in nearby galaxies, astronomers hope to make important scientific advances with some of the first data available from JWST.

The second reason is that JWST observations build on other studies conducted using telescopes such as Hubble and some of the world’s most powerful ground-based observatories.

So far, JWST has collected images of 19 nearby star-forming galaxies, which astronomers then combined with catalogs of 10,000 star clusters from Hubble, spectrograms of 20,000 star-forming emission nebulae from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and observations of The 12,000 dense, dark molecular clouds identified by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) could coalesce.

These combined observations span the entire electromagnetic spectrum and provide astronomers with unprecedented opportunities to look into the details of star formation.