(ORDO NEWS) — If you’re still excited about the first release of full color images from the James Webb Space Telescope, you’re not alone.
This week we were presented with the very first image, which was soon followed by four brand new images that show our universe in never-before-seen detail, and we could hardly stop looking at them.
But there is one very important detail that we missed at first glance!
In the upper left corner of the image of the South Rim Nebula, there is what looks like a streak of light, but is actually a side view of the nebula. galaxy.
“I bet it’s part of a nebula,” NASA astronomer Carl Gordon said during the image display. , according to Business Insider.
“I lost the bet because then we looked more closely at the NIRcam [Near Infrared Camera] and MIRI [Mid Infrared Instrument] images and it is very clear that this is an edge-on galaxy.”
This not only looks cool, but will allow astronomers to study the distribution of stars throughout the galaxy.
In case you missed it yesterday, what you’re looking at is spectacular waves of death from the South Rim Nebula, a massive cloud of dust and gas about 2,000 light-years away.
There are two stars in its center. The dimmer of them is a white dwarf, the collapse of the core of a dead star, the mass of which during its existence was eight times the mass of the Sun.
It reached the end of its life, was blown away by its outer layers, and the core collapsed into a superdense object: 1.4 times the mass of the Sun packed into an Earth-sized object.
For the first time JWST was able to show that this star is covered in dust.
The brighter star is at an earlier stage in its evolution and will one day explode into its own nebula.
Left: JWST Near Infrared Camera showing orange hydrogen bubbles from newly formed expansions, as well as a blue haze of hot ionized gas from the remnants of a dead star’s heated core.
Right in the JWST mid-infrared image. Tool, the blue hydrocarbons form structures similar to the orange ones in the previous image because they collect on the surface of the hydrogen dust rings.
You can read more about the South Ring N. Ebula images on the NASA website.
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