The infinite universe opens up again before the lens of the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. This weekend he shared an amazing image of a galaxy 17 million light years from Earth, with extraordinary sharpness.
It is the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, Located in the constellation Virgo.
As the European Space Agency (ESA), “This portrait of NGC 5068 is part of a campaign to create an astronomical treasure trove, a repository of observations of star formation in nearby galaxies.”
In the picture you see the nucleus and part of a spiral arm of the galaxy. There are thousands of tiny stars, most of them dense in a whitish bar that forms the core of NGC 5068.
The goal of astronomers is drive scientific advances with the first available data of the James Webb Space Telescope.
According to Harvard Smithsonian, most galaxies have ultra-bright centers due to hot dust that is heated by massive outbursts. This is what experts want to study further with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
The Significance of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
Released on December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope It is located 1.5 million kilometers from our planet, at the L2 Earth-Sun point.
It has a primary mirror of 18 hexagonal segments which, combined, create a mirror with a diameter of 6.5 meters, much larger than Hubble’s 2.4 meters.
Key is also his sharp vision in infrared wavelengths with MIRI and NIRCam instruments.
In almost two years, this telescope has captured extremely valuable observations for science in generalespecially about the formation of stars in nearby galaxies.
Among them are images of the spiral galaxy IC 5332 and the so-called ghost galaxy, M74, like the ones we see below.