NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently captured the chaos in the Cartwheel galaxy, located nearly 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. It also captured two smaller satellite galaxies in the background of many other galaxies.
This detailed image, created by Webb’s powerful infrared vision, has revealed new details about star formation and the galaxy’s central black hole. It shows how the Wheel Galaxy has changed over billions of years.
The Wheel galaxy, as seen in the image, looks like a cart wheel. Its appearance is the result of an intense event – a high-speed collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy (not visible in this image).
NASA officials said: “Galactic-sized collisions cause a cascade of different, smaller events between the galaxies involved; Cartwheel is no exception.
The galaxy contains two rings: a bright inner ring and a surrounding, colorful ring. Both rings expand outward from the center of the collision, like ripples in a lake after a stone is thrown into it. Because of these exciting features of the galaxy, this galaxy is also known as the Ring galaxy.
Huge young star clusters are seen in the brightest regions of the core, which also includes a huge amount of hot material. On the other hand, star formation and supernovae predominate in the outer ring, which has been growing for nearly 440 million years. As it grows, this ring collides with the surrounding gas, causing stars to form.
Other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have already studied the Wheel. But the dramatic galaxy is shrouded in mystery—perhaps literally, given the amount of dust that obscures the view. Webb, with his ability to detect infrared light, is now revealing new insights into the nature of the Wheel.
This image from the Webb Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) shows a cluster of galaxies, including a large distorted ring galaxy known as the Wheel. The Cartwheel Galaxy, located 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor, is composed of a bright inner ring and an active outer ring. While this outer ring has a lot of star formation, the dusty zone between them reveals many stars and star clusters. Sincerely: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
NASA said: “The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Webb’s primary camera, looks in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, seeing crucial wavelengths of light that can reveal even more stars than are seen in visible light. This is because young stars, many of which form in the outer ring, are less obscured by the presence of dust when viewed in infrared light. In this image, the NIRCam data are colored blue, orange and yellow. The galaxy shows many blue dots, individual stars or pockets of star formation. NIRCam also reveals the difference between the smooth distribution, or shape, of the populations of older stars and dense dust in the core compared to the clumpy shapes associated with the populations of younger stars outside.
“Learning finer details about the dust that inhabits the galaxy, however, requires the Webb Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). MIRI data is colored red in this composite image. It reveals regions in the Wheel Galaxy rich in hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds, as well as silicate dust, like much of the dust on Earth. These regions form a series of spiral spokes that essentially form the skeleton of the galaxy. These spokes were evident in previous Hubble observations published in 2018, but they become much more prominent in this Webb image.
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