NASA James Webb Space Telescope image
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to astound. Now it is working together with the 30-year-old Hubble telescope. Working together, the two telescopes found interstellar dust between two galaxies.
NASA says the James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
In the new images, researchers traced light that was emitted by the bright white elliptical galaxy seen on the left of the above image through the spiral galaxy at right. As a result, they were able to identify the effects of interstellar dust in the spiral galaxy. Webb’s near-infrared data also shows the galaxy’s longer, extremely dusty spiral arms in far more detail, giving them an appearance of overlapping with the central bulge of the bright white elliptical galaxy on the left, though the pair are not interacting.
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In this image, green, yellow, and red were assigned to Webb’s near-infrared data taken in 0.9, 1.5, and 3.56 microns (F090W, F150W, and F356W respectively). Blue was assigned to two Hubble filters, ultraviolet data taken in 0.34 microns (F336W) and visible light in 0.61 microns (F606W).
“We got more than we bargained for by combining data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope!” explained NASA’s Thaddeus Cesari. “Webb’s new data allowed us to trace the light that was emitted by the bright white elliptical galaxy, at left, through the winding spiral galaxy at right – and identify the effects of interstellar dust in the spiral galaxy. This image of galaxy pair VV 191 includes near-infrared light from Webb, and ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble.”
He went on to explain that understanding where dust is present in galaxies is important because dust changes the brightness and colors that appear in images of the galaxies. Dust grains are partially responsible for the formation of new stars and planets, so, NASA says, they are always seeking to identify their presence for further studies.
The James Webb Space Telescope image also holds a second discovery – a faint red arc to the left of the white elliptical galaxy at left. This is a very distant galaxy whose light is bent by the gravity of the elliptical foreground galaxy – and its appearance is duplicated.
These images of the lensed galaxy are so faint and so red that they went unrecognized in Hubble data, but are unmistakable in Webb’s near-infrared image. Simulations of gravitationally lensed galaxies like this help us reconstruct how much mass is in individual stars, along with how much dark matter is in the core of this galaxy.
