An monumental mosaic of Stephan’s Quintet is the most important picture so far from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, masking about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It accommodates over 150 million pixels and is constructed from nearly 1,000 separate picture recordsdata. The visible grouping of 5 galaxies was captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Last month, NASA launched a batch of long-awaited, jaw-dropping pictures from its latest and strongest area observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In unprecedented element, photos revealed distant wonders such because the Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, and Stephan’s Quintet—a set of 5 dazzling galaxies, a few of that are actively colliding with one another.
In this video, Philip Appleton, a employees scientist at Caltech’s IPAC astronomy heart, walks us by way of the brand new picture of the quintet. Four of the 5 galaxies are gravitationally sure and make up a compact galaxy group positioned tons of of tens of millions of light-years away within the Pegasus constellation. At least three galaxies on this group are actively colliding with one another, producing shock waves that set off new star formation.
Appleton and his colleagues have studied this turbulent area for practically 20 years utilizing different telescopes such because the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, whose information archive relies at IPAC. Spitzer was managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) manages for NASA.
