NASA has released a stunning new look at a dwarf galaxy that sits right around the celestial corner from the Milky Way, as seen by the groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope, which launched on Dec. 25 last year, is the most powerful the space agency has ever deployed and the result of a historic international collaboration. Just 10 months into its mission, it's already revealing new insights into the vast mysteries of the universe.
In addition to being the most powerful, the new space telescope is also NASA's largest. It has a 21-foot (6.5-meter) golden mirror made up of 18 hexagonal segments that allow it to probe deeper into the infrared wavelengths. Nestled behind that gilded honeycomb is a suite of advanced imaging instruments, which are responsible for the observations now being transmitted back home. There's never been a telescope quite like the James Webb in space, and scientists hope it'll help answer some of the many questions about how the universe came to be.
The latest image from NASA (above) brings unprecedented detail to a remote member of our galactic neighborhood, the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM,) which lies just three million light-years away. Where the Spitzer Space Telescope years ago captured blurry smudges of starlight (still an impressive feat for its time), JWST obtained a remarkably crisp view — one that almost seems to glitter with stars too faint to previously see. Some of these stars formed in the early universe, making WLM a good target for reconstructing processes that occurred billions of years ago.
The Dwarf Galaxy In Our Neighborhood
The level of detail in the JWST observation is not only striking, but it's also revelatory. "We can see a myriad of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting clouds of nebular gas within the galaxy; foreground stars with Webb's diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with neat features like tidal tails," said Kristen McQuinn, a lead scientist with the Webb Early Release Science program, in a conversation with NASA's official blog. It can now be used as a point of comparison as Webb presses onward.
WLM's relative remoteness compared to other objects in the Milky Way also goes a long way toward uncomplicating the view and what scientists can glean from it. "Many of the other nearby galaxies are intertwined and entangled with the Milky Way, which makes them harder to study," McQuinn says. Processes over the eons have also left it with similar gaseous properties to the small galaxies of the young universe. With each new study of this dwarf galaxy — Hubble, Spitzer and now James Webb — scientists get a better picture of how stars may have evolved in long-ago galaxies.
Source: NASA blogs