Good afternoon my Brothers and Sisters in Arms...
As you may already know, the James Webb Space Telescope has passed all its operational tests and has been commissioned to begin its work... In the course of scanning deep into the universe, It homed in on a Galaxy some 500 million light years away, called the Cartwheel Galaxy... The following is some data provided by Space.com... I highly recommend that this video be watched FULL SCREEN WITH SOUND UP, FOR THE BEST POSSIBLE VIEWING, ON THE LARGEST SCREEN YOU HAVE AVAILABLE TO YOU...
From Space.com:
"The James Webb Space Telescope peered through dust and gas to reveal star formation in a rare wheel-shaped galaxy that formed in a long-ago galactic crash.
The galaxy, called the Cartwheel for its striking resemblance to a wheel of an old fashioned carriage, was previously studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, but Webb's infrared gaze has revealed a plethora of previously unseen details in the galaxy's structure.
Infrared light, which is essentially heat, penetrates through dust clouds, allowing the James Webb Space Telescope to peer into regions of space that are obscured to optical telescopes, such as Hubble. In the new images, Webb instruments NIRCam and MIRI, revealed individual stars within the star-forming regions in the outer ring of the Cartwheel galaxy, as well as clusters of very young stars around the galaxy's central supermassive black hole, which is also shrouded in dust.
The Cartwheel, located about 500 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Sculptor in the southern sky, is a rather rare type of galaxy that astronomers call a ring galaxy. Scientists believe that long ago, the Cartwheel was a common spiral galaxy, similar to our Milky Way. Then, about 700 to 800 million light-years ago, it collided with a smaller galaxy.
As the outer ring expands, it pushes outward the dust and gas that surrounds the galaxy and triggers star formation, according to STScI. The areas where new stars are being born appear as small blue dots in the image and are scattered throughout the galaxy, but especially concentrated in the outer ring."
Enjoy!
Kerry
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