This week we witnessed the unveiling of the first full-color image from the James Webb Telescope, followed shortly afterwards by four entirely new images showing our universe in unprecedented detail, but there is one very important detail we missed at first glance, surreptitiously located in the upper left of the Southern Ring Nebula images. What looks like a streak of light, is actually a side view of a galaxy.
james webb telescope pictures
And according to what was reported by the “RT” website, NASA astronomer Carl Gordon said, while revealing the image: “I made a bet saying that it was part of the nebula …
I lost the bet, because then we looked more carefully at each of the NIRcam photos [كاميرا الأشعة تحت الحمراء القريبة] The MIRI [آلة الأشعة تحت الحمراء المتوسطة]It’s very clearly a galaxy headed to the edge.”
And not only does it look cool, this perspective should allow astronomers to study how stars are distributed throughout the galaxy.
And in case you missed it, what you’re looking at are stunning waves of death from the Southern Ring Nebula – a massive cloud of dust and gas located about 2,000 light-years away.
There are two stars in the middle. A faint dwarf is a white dwarf – the collapsed core of a dead star – which, during its lifetime, was up to eight times the mass of the Sun. Reaching the end of its life, it blew out its outer layers, and the core collapsed into a super-dense object: up to 1.4 times the mass of the Sun packed into an Earth-sized object.
For the first time, JWST has been able to detect that this star is covered in dust. The brightest star is at an early stage of its evolution and will one day explode in its own nebula.
On the left, the JWST near-infrared camera reveals bubbling orange hydrogen from newly formed expansions as well as a blue haze of hot ionized gas from the hot dead star’s core.
On the right, in the image captured by JWST’s mid-infrared instrument, blue hydrocarbons form patterns similar to the orange in the previous image, as they collect on the surface of the hydrogen dust rings.