[imagesource: Getty Images]
Some of us are still recovering from those mind-bending images via the new and improved, gold-mirrored $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Despite the miraculous machine getting knocked by a space curveball, it is still hard at work collecting cosmic data more than a million kilometres from Earth, giving astronomers a whole lot to get excited about.
Sifting through the public JWST datasets, stargazers across the planet have been trying to make sense of the exquisite and priceless information, reported CNET.
As a result, Twitter is teeming with starry-eyed astronomers sharing their discoveries with the rest of us.
One of the most mesmerising shares comes via Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.
Stare into the 30-million-light-year-away spiral body’s hypnotic glow:
Let’s just see what JWST observed yesterday…
Oh, good god. pic.twitter.com/8UQWi2zPlR— gbrammer (@gbrammer) July 18, 2022
That vivid purple vortex is the distant galaxy NGC 628, otherwise known as Messier 74 or the “Phantom Galaxy”.
To make the image really pop, Brammer had to assign various colour filters to the raw data of the wavelengths MIRI detected emanating from Messier 74:
“For a tiny bit more context,” Brammer wrote as a response to curious commenters, “the purple color cast here is actually ‘real’ in the sense that emission from interstellar cigarette smoke (PAH molecules) makes the filters used for the blue and red channels brighter relative to the green.”
In other words, the heavy amethyst hues we see are kind of aesthetically accurate.
AGAIN:
Side-by-side comparison of Spitzer/IRAC and JWST/MIRI. This is real and you are completely unprepared*.
Credits below. pic.twitter.com/yqHaIEf7KR
— Prof. Allison Kirkpatrick (@AkAstronomy) July 18, 2022
In the image on the right, the blue dots represent hot gas and stars, while the galaxy’s cool dust is shown in red.
NASA astronomer Janice Lee, who Brammer said is responsible for “planning and executing” the data behind the violet void, also shared something enthralling:
It’s a GIF of galaxy NGC 7496 that switches between the Hubble’s visible lens and the JWST’s infrared lens in order to light up “dark dust lanes, revealing earliest stages of star formation in detail,” Lee wrote in the Tweet.
Observe:
Our #phangs team was up in the early morning with @SpaceGeck waiting to download our 1st!! @NASAWebb obs… data are just
miraculous
— Dr. Janice Lee (@janiceleeastro) July 15, 2022
That concoction makes up part of a program called Phangs, or Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby Galaxies, of which Lee is a part.
Erm, does anyone want to start a band where we sing exclusively about being infinitesimal? I suddenly have the urge and already have the band name: Phangs:
According to NASA, Phangs has a mission to simply unravel the mysteries of star formation with the JWST while simultaneously sharing any discoveries with the entire astronomical community.
In short, the idea is to help scientists across the world join hands while watching over JWST, thus expediting the process of decoding the unfiltered universe.
I want to help with my non-existent band.
Excitingly, scientists using the JWST information have already been submitting papers for peer review, one of which concerns a transient and possible supernova.
Everything is moving so quickly. It’s beautiful.
Cast your untrained eye over to this red-dotted “oldest galaxy we’ve ever seen”. It was spotted by early-release JWST NIRCam data:
This discovery is described in a paper on arXiv led by Dr. Rohan Naidu (@Rohan_Naidu); the team determined that this galaxy (which they’re calling GLASS-z13) is about 500 parsecs across and perhaps a billion Suns in mass.
Read more:https://t.co/U5gLZo0yDP
— Paul Byrne (@ThePlanetaryGuy) July 20, 2022
Astronomers are still only scratching the surface when it comes to the information that JWST is providing.
There are many magnificent years to come thanks to its gold-hued eyes on the universe.
[source:cnet]
