[imagesource: Northrop Grumman]

While you were thinking about what to eat for your next meal, or which outfit to wear, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was zooming in on far-flung galaxies almost as old as the beginning of the universe itself.

If you want that kind of perspective on the regular, there’s a Twitter bot that will keep you up-to-date on what Webb is observing at any given moment.

The remarkable gold-plated, infrared eyes have been capturing nebulae, galaxies, and spectra from exoplanet’s atmospheres, as well as shedding light on a bevvy of scientific questions and concerns.

The latest, per Gizmodo, is the “bamboozling beauty of the Phantom Galaxy”:

Webb’s latest image release is a special collab with the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists combined data from the two observatories to produce these spectacular shots of the spiral Phantom Galaxy (also known as Messier 74), about 32 million light-years from Earth.

Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team; ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

The images capture gas clouds, dust, and star-forming regions in the galaxy in sharp relief. You can even view the distant cosmos beyond the galaxy’s rust-red arms, as seen in optical and mid-infrared light

The Phantom Galaxy is quite difficult to spot, but the JWST has captured it in fine detail.

The spiral galaxy is like our own Milky Way, albeit a bit older, and is a great target for astronomers seeking to better understand galactic evolution.

Look at the galaxy in different wavelengths of light, which highlights different features of its structure. There’s the spiral seen in optical from the Hubble, optical/mid-infrared from the JWST and Hubble, and infrared wavelengths from the JWST:

Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team; ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

Scientists still need to sift through all the data to draw conclusions about how stars form in these nearby spiral galaxies.

Then, at another spot in space and time, scientists and the media are battling over whether or not the “Big Bang is dead”.

In a nutshell, observations by the James Webb Space Telescope have not disproven the Big Bang, despite certain popular articles claiming otherwise.

The ins and outs of this are a little complex, but Inverse does a pretty good job of explaining everything if you are interested.

Basically, the JWST has pinpointed puzzling and unexpected data which suggests that while the Big Bang model isn’t exactly wrong, some of our assumptions about it might be.

[sources:gizmodo&inverse]