The James Webb Space Telescope has captured new details of a galaxy, known as Phantom, in a spectacular image showing its spiral shape released by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.
Launched into space in late 2021 and operational since July, James Webb has since revealed stunning images of Jupiter, nebulae and other distant galaxies, providing scientists with a wealth of never-before-seen data to analyze.
The one published this Monday shows M74, or the Ghost Galaxy, its bright blue heart and its 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 penetrating gaze revealed fine filaments of gas and dust in the luminous spiral arms that extend from the center of this image,” says the ESA on its site, which specifies that the galaxy had already been observed by the Hubble’s mythical space. telescope, launched in 1990 and still in operation.
“Identify the regions of the galaxy where stars are formed”
The European agency, which co-developed the telescope with NASA, also points out that the “lack of gas” allows a clearer view of the stars in the center of the galaxy, located about 32 million years away, in the Pisces constellation.
The collected data “will allow astronomers to identify the regions of the galaxy where stars are forming, accurately measure the mass and age of star clusters, and better understand the nature of the small dust grains drifting in the ‘interstellar space’, further notes the ESA.
An engineering gem valued at 10,000 million dollars, the James Webb Telescope makes its observations 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
It has detected, for the first time, the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, that is, a planet outside our solar system, researchers announced last week.
Source: BFM TV
