[imagesource: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI]

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently peered into deep space with its infrared gaze and discovered all the “stellar gymnastics in The Cartwheel Galaxy” as NASA put it.

While seeing this spiralling body of hot gas and stars in such clear light is impressive, a new video released by the European Space Agency shows just how incredibly far away it actually is.

The chaotic structure, as seen above, is some 500 million light-years away from Earth and was formed by the collision of two smaller galaxies.

This collision caused the outer ring to expand, like a ripple in the water after a stone has been thrown in, which it has been doing for about 440 million years.

Alright, ready to feel impossibly tiny?

Faraway lights, infrared camera, and starry action:

I hope you watched that in a dark room with a solid sound system.

Over to Gizmodo:

“Webb’s observations capture Cartwheel in a very transitory stage. The form that the Cartwheel Galaxy will eventually take, given these two competing forces, is still a mystery. However, this snapshot provides perspective on what happened to the galaxy in the past and what it will do in the future,” said ESA in a press release.

In another spot in space, the JWST found the most distant star ever observed thanks to a ripple in spacetime that creates extreme magnification, per Forbes:

It’s currently 28 billion light-years away and its light has traveled 12.9 billion years into JWST’s optics. It existed just 900 million years after the big bang in a galaxy astronomers have nicknamed the Sunrise Arc.

The ancient star – named WHL0137-LS or “Earendel” which means “morning star” or “rising light” in old English – has an estimated mass greater than 50 times the mass of the Sun.

Behold:

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI

Okay, it’s not actually that obvious sparkling star at the top.

Rather, seen in this zoomed-in image of the Sunrise Arc is the curve of red light cutting through the centre. Earendel is the second star in from the top of the arc, between two slightly brighter stars:

Image: JWST/NASA/ESA

That reddish line is the gravitational lensing or nature’s magnifying glass:

It occurs when the gravitational pull from a closer, but aligned galaxy distorts and bends the light from a distant star or galaxy, causing it to appear misshapen and be magnified.

It’s essentially a ripple in spacetime that gives it extreme magnification and it’s how JWST will study the most distant and intrinsically faint stars and galaxies close to the big bang 13.8 billion years ago.

While the Hubble Space Telescope takes weeks to shoot deep field images like this, and in much lower resolution and sensitivity, the JWST can shoot amazing detail in just three hours.

How wondrous to be able to see the infrared universe as we’ve never seen it before.

[sources:gizmodo&forbes]