James Webb Captures New Images of the Cartwheel Galaxy

The space telescope’s powerful infrared gaze offers a new sight of just how the galaxy has changed throughout billions of years.

The James Webb Space Telescope, belonging to NASA, has gazed into the disarray of the Cartwheel Galaxy, revealing fresh insights into star formation and the central black hole of the galaxy. Using its potent infrared detection capability, the Webb telescope produced an intricate image of the Cartwheel galaxy, along with two smaller companion galaxies, set against a backdrop of many other galaxies. This picture delivers a new view of how the Cartwheel Galaxy has evolved over billions of years.

The Cartwheel Galaxy is a peculiar sight, located in the Sculptor constellation and situated roughly 500 million light-years away. The wagon-wheel-like appearance of the Cartwheel Galaxy is the outcome of a violent event – a high-velocity crash between a big spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy that is not visible in this image. Galactic-scale impacts typically trigger a series of smaller events between the involved galaxies, and the Cartwheel Galaxy is not exempt from this phenomenon.

The impact most significantly impacted the galaxy’s shape and structure. The Cartwheel Galaxy sports two rings– a bright internal ring and a surrounding, vibrant ring. These two rings expand outwards from the center of the impact, like ripples in a pool after a stone falls into it. As a result of these distinguishing characteristics, astronomers call this a “ring galaxy,” a construct less common than spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.

The luminous nucleus of the Cartwheel Galaxy is distinguished by an exceptional concentration of high-temperature dust, and the most intense sections are the locations of enormous, recently-formed clusters of stars. In contrast, the outer ring of the galaxy has been expanding for approximately 440 million years and is predominantly characterized by the formation of new stars and supernovas. As this ring increases, it smashes into surrounding gas and gives start to star formation.

Before this, other telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, also studied the Cartwheel Galaxy. However, due to the substantial amount of dust obstructing the view, this stunning galaxy has remained shrouded in mystery.

With its potential to identify infrared light, Webb now gives us a better understanding of the nature of the cartwheel galaxy. The Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Webb’s main imager, searches in the near-infrared spectrum from 0.6 to 5 microns, observing essential wavelengths of light that can expose even more stars than observed in visible light. Young stars, which are mainly forming in the outer ring, are less obscured by dust when viewed in infrared light.

The NIRCam data in this image is represented using shades of blue, orange, and yellow. The galaxy exhibits several distinctive blue dots that correspond to either individual stars or clusters of stars forming in pockets. Furthermore, the NIRCam illustrates a contrast between the smooth distribution or shape of the previous generations of stars and the dense concentration of dust in the nucleus, in comparison to the uneven, patchy forms that correspond to the younger population of stars situated beyond it.

However, understanding finer details concerning the galaxy’s dust calls for Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). MIRI data is colored red in this composite picture. The Cartwheel Galaxy regions that are abundant in hydrocarbons and other chemical substances, as well as silicate dust akin to the dust found on our planet, are emphasized in the Webb telescope image. These regions are arranged in a set of spiral spokes that serve as the galaxy’s structural support. While these spokes were present in earlier Hubble observations from 2018, they are much more prominent in the Webb image.

Webb’s monitorings highlight that the Cartwheel is in a highly transitory phase. The galaxy, which was supposedly a typical spiral galaxy like the Milky Way before its impact, will remain to change. While Webb provides a snapshot of the present state of the Cartwheel, it additionally offers an understanding of what occurred to this galaxy in the past and how it will progress in the future.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the foremost space science observatory in the world. The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaborative effort between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency, aims to unravel enigmas in our solar system, explore distant exoplanets orbiting other stars, and investigate the hidden structures and beginnings of our universe and humanity’s position within it.

Originally published by: NASA