Newly released James Webb Space Telescope images of 19 distant galaxies shine a whole new, dynamic and vibrant light on these beautiful realms. The trove of cosmic portraits captured by this $10 billion telescope reveal highly detailed and quite breathtaking facial views of the spirals as seen from the instrument’s vantage point in space.
These JWST images had astronomers particularly excited when they were delivered, as they highlighted that no two galaxies are the same when viewed with the kind of precision the JWST can provide.
The observations, part of the Physics at High Angular Resolution in Near Galaxies (PHANGS) program, mainly highlight the structures of gas and dust in these galaxies, offering astronomers hints about how spiral galaxies like the Milky Way form stars.
“The new images from JWST are extraordinary,” Janice Lee, project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement. ‘They are mind-boggling, even for researchers who have been studying the same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved to the smallest scale ever observed and tell a story about the cycle of star formation.’
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The images show glowing orange dust lanes captured by the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
The same instrument also captured stars still forming, encased in envelopes of gas and dust from which they are gathering mass. These envelopes can be seen as red ‘seeds’ at the tops of dust lanes.
“Here we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” Erik Rosolowsky, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta, said in the statement.
This aspect of the newly imaged spiral galaxies is especially prominent in the image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300, located 69 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.
Millions more mature stars appear as bright blue jewels shining through orange lanes of gas and dust in the images captured by the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Some of these blue stars are clustered together, while others are scattered among their own galaxies.
These hot blue stars are clearly visible in the JWST PHANGS image of the spiral galaxy NGC 7496, located 24 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Grus.
To the surprise of the astronomers who examined these spiral galaxies imaged by JWST, the powerful space telescope also discovered several voids in gas and dust orbits.
“These holes may have been created by one or more stars that exploded and carved giant holes in the interstellar material,” Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, said in the statement.
One of the galaxies imaged by JWST as part of the PHANGS program, NGC 5068, located 20 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, appears to be dominated by such large voids.
Of course, one of the most stunning features of any spiral galaxy involves the ‘arms’ that radiate from the central core of tightly packed stars, forming an iconic spiral. By following these arms, astronomers can discover vast areas of glowing gas and dust.
“These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky explains. “We think of these as waves, and their distance tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.”
As dense clouds of gas and dust collapse to form new stars, studying these structures in detail could provide important information about how intense bursts of star formation in galaxies are caused, sustained and then extinguished.
These spiral arms have probably never appeared as dynamic and vibrant as in the new JWST image of NGC 628, a spiral galaxy located 32 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. In the image, the galaxy’s arms appear to spew gas and dust like bright orange spray paint splatters.
In addition, some of the galaxies seen by JWST in this observing program show pinkish-red diffraction peaks scattered across their central regions.
“That is a clear sign that an active supermassive black hole may exist,” Eva Schinnerer, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in the statement. “Or the star clusters towards the center are so bright that they have saturated that part of the image.”
This can be seen in the JWST image of NGC 1365, located 56 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Fornax.
One thing that seems clear from these 19 images of spiral galaxies is that galaxies appear to grow from within, meaning the birth of stars begins in the hearts of galaxies and then radiates outward through those spiral arms.
This means that the further a star is from the core of a galaxy, the more likely it is to be relatively young, with old stars usually located at the hearts of galaxies.
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“I feel like our team is continually overwhelmed – in a positive way – by the amount of detail in these images,” Homas Williams, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, said in the statement.
The full catalog of new images of JWST spiral galaxies is available here.