According to astronomers, roughly 60 percent of all galaxies in the universe are spiral, reports the news website CNN.
For example, even our Milky Way galaxy is a spiral galaxy – and our Solar System is located in only one of its arms.
- Galaxies are gravitationally bound groups of stars, interstellar matter, cosmic dust and other cosmic bodies. Spiral galaxy are one of the four types of galaxies, which are distinguished by their mass, size and shape. A characteristic feature of such a galaxy is the central region, which is spherical in shape, with two or more spiral arms extending from it. Spiral galaxies contain tens to hundreds of billions of stars.
Thanks to infrared radiation, the James Webb telescope is the only one that can observe very old and distant objects and at the same time take very detailed pictures of them. Thanks to such observations, astronomers can better understand the formation of stars and spiral galaxies.
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US space agency NASA recently published images of nineteen galaxies in whose spiral arms the Webb camera captured millions of stars. You can recognize them by their blue glow. Some stars are scattered along the spiral arms, while others can be observed in star clusters.
Foto: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)
The James Webb Space Telescope observed 19 nearby spiral galaxies.
“Webb’s new images are extraordinary. They are astounding even to scientists who have been studying the same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments (galactic filaments) are resolved at the smallest scales ever observed and tell the story of the star formation cycle,” commented scientist and member of the PHANGS project Janice Lee.
The formation of stars, galactic nuclei and supermassive black holes
Scientists were also interested in data from the MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), which is part of the Webb telescope. The images show glowing cosmic dust and stars that have not yet fully formed but are encased in gas and dust and appear as red dots. It is in these places where there is gas and dust that we would find the newest and most massive stars in galaxies.
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Space telescope images also show large spherical shells found in gas and dust.
“These holes could have been created by one or more stars that exploded and carved giant holes in the interstellar material,” explained Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University in Columbus.
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According to scientists, galaxies grow from the inside out, so star formation begins in the cores of galaxies, and they then spiral away from them. The further the star is from the galactic core, the more likely it is to be a younger star. On the other hand, there are older stars near the cores of galaxies. They glow blue in the pictures.
Some galactic nuclei contain rose-red diffraction lines, which are lines that radiate from bright light sources. According to astronomers, such coloration is a sign that an active supermassive black hole may be located in such a place.
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Thanks to the images from the Webb telescope and based on other data from the PHANGS project, scientists can continue further research and thus create a more comprehensive view of the life cycles of stars.
James Webb Telescope at a Glance:
The James Webb Telescope was launched into space on December 25, 2021, becoming the imaginary successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Compared to it, it should provide images in a higher resolution and bring better research opportunities to scientists. It is named after James E. Webb, who was an important figure in NASA’s Apollo program. The entire project was created in international cooperation between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.
The images from the James Webb telescope were obtained as part of the PHANGS (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS) project.
More than 150 astronomers from around the world are involved in this project, who also examine images from the Hubble Space Telescope or the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument, which is part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
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2024-02-09 15:37:19
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