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The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a highly detailed image of a nearby dwarf galaxy. The near-infrared view opens up the deepest view of the stellar panorama, which could offer astronomers an ideal tool for studying aspects of the early universe.
The image shows a row of stars in a so-called lone dwarf galaxy Wolf – Lundmark – MelotteIt is about 3 million light-years away from our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and about one-tenth the size.
The WLM galaxy is interesting to astronomers because it is largely isolated and has a similar chemical composition to galaxies in the early universe. NASA🇧🇷
Launched in December 2021, the Webb telescope is the most powerful space observatory to date. It is able to detect the faint light of incredibly distant galaxies glowing in infrared light, a wavelength invisible to the human eye.
Hubble Space Telescope and the now defunct Spitzer Space Telescope have described the WLM galaxy, however He used the Near Infrared Camera, also called Webb NIRCamcapture in unprecedented detail.
“We can see countless individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting nebulous gas clouds within the galaxy; Foreground stars with Webb diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with neat features like tidal tails,” said Kristen McQuinn, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. In a statement published in NASA Website🇧🇷 The tidal tail is a thin “tail” of stars and interstellar gas extending from the galaxy.
“It’s a truly magnificent sight,” he said. Webb Early Release Science program🇧🇷
NASA’s official Webb telescope account on Twitter declared that compared to past space observatory images, Webb’s NIRCam image “makes the whole space sparkle” — a reference to the song “Bejeweled.” Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights.
On NASA’s website, McQuinn noted that some of the stars depicted in this latest Webb image are low-mass stars that formed early in the universe and can live for billions of years.
“By determining the properties (such as their ages) of these low-mass stars, we can gain insight into what happened in the very distant past,” he said.
