[imagesource: esa/nasa/csa/j.leeandthephangs-jwstteam]

This is your occasional reminder that you are puny and insignificant, along with all your Earthly problems.

It’s a nice feeling if you just go with it and pretend you’re merely an atom being sucked into a black hole of nothingness, without bills or adult friendships to worry over.

The James Webb Space Telescope is really adept at giving us this much-needed perspective, so powerful that it can vividly see stars in a galaxy 17 million light-years away.

For more perspective, the Milky Way’s neighbourhood of galaxies called the Local Group, is five million light-years away – so yeah, the Webb telescope is hella talented and we’re ferociously minute.

Peer into the starry heart of galaxy NGC 5068 which is nowhere near anything familiar to us whatsoever. Each individual dot of white light you can see is a star, per Mashable, of which there are billions:

🆕 In our latest Picture of the Month Webb peers behind bars, revealing the bright tendrils of gas and stars that belong to the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068. Its bright central bar is visible in the upper left of this image. 🖼🌌 Read here: https://t.co/IShirMyzt8 or 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/16QTdLs5HV

— ESA Webb Telescope (@ESA_Webb) June 2, 2023

Webb is able to see infrared light, a type of light that’s invisible to the naked eye, which pierces through thick clouds of cosmic dust and gas, allowing us unprecedented views into galactic hearts.

The bright bar of white light in the upper left-hand corner is where all the action is as that is where the stars are most concentrated:

Here’s what you’re seeing in this image of Webb peering through “gargantuan clouds of dust”:

• The radiant white bar is the galaxy’s core. Similar to the Milky Way, NGC 5068 is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning it has a long bar-shaped structure at its center, which is composed of densely-packed stars.
• All those bright dots both in the core and populating the image are stars. Many thousands are visible. And though we can’t see them, many of those stars almost certainly harbor wild, exotic planets.
• On the right is a curving, spiral arm of the galaxy. (In our galaxy, Earth inhabits the farther-reaches of a spiral arm).
• The general skeletal-like structure in the galaxy is made from colossal clumps and filaments of dust, the ESA explains.

The greater goal is to better grasp how stars, like our energy-providing sun, form and evolve in galaxies.

The European Space Agency, which collaborates on the telescope with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, wrote that “With its ability to peer through the gas and dust enshrouding newborn stars, Webb is the perfect telescope to explore the processes governing star formation.”

There’s so much to explore.

[source:mashable]