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NASA's Webb Telescope Studies Moon-Forming Disk Around Massive Planet - NASA Science
(science.nasa.gov)
Webb brings cosmic lenses into focus Nature’s magnifying glass 🔎
Galaxies in these images might look stretched or warped. That’s due to gravitational lensing, a tool that allows us to peer even further into the universe!
Gravitational lensing occurs because the gravity of massive objects like galaxies and galaxy clusters can warp the fabric of spacetime, bending the path of light around the object. When a massive foreground object lines up with a background galaxy, the light from the background galaxy bends on its way to our telescopes.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasawebbtelescope/54822781985/in/album-72177720323168468
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A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system. The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualifies it as rare, say researchers.
Expand your imagination 🍥
What appears to be a single galaxy is actually two that are very far apart! The closer galaxy lies in the center of the image, while the more distant galaxy appears to be wrapped around it in a phenomenon we call an “Einstein ring.”
Einstein rings occur when light from a distant galaxy gets bent by the gravity of a massive closer-by object, in this case another galaxy. The light from the distant galaxy that would otherwise travel in a straight line follows the bend of gravitationally warped spacetime, brightening the light from behind the galaxy and acting as a sort of natural magnifying glass. Einstein predicted this effect in his theory of relativity.
This image of Arp 107, shown by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), reveals the supermassive black hole that lies in the center of the large spiral galaxy to the right. This black hole, which pulls much of the dust into lanes, also display’s Webb’s characteristic diffraction spikes, caused by the light that it emits interacting with the structure of the telescope itself.
Perhaps the defining feature of the region, which MIRI reveals, are the millions of young stars that are forming, highlighted in blue. These stars are surrounded by dusty silicates and soot-like molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The small elliptical galaxy to the left, which has already gone through much of its star formation, is composed of many of these organic molecules.
Credits Image NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2024/132/01J74B5B0C2MKBE2QXTMW46T4Z
One of the brightest nebulae in the night sky is Messier 42, the Orion Nebula, located south of Orion’s belt. At its core is the young Trapezium Cluster of stars, the most massive of which illuminate the surrounding gas and dust with their intense ultraviolet radiation fields, while protostars continue to form today in the OMC-1 molecular cloud behind.
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Herbig-Haro (HH) objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. This image of HH 211 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals an outflow from a Class 0 protostar, an infantile analog of our Sun when it was no more than a few tens of thousands of years old and with a mass only 8% of the present-day Sun (it will eventually grow into a star like the Sun).
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Webb Reveals Intricate Details in the Remains of a Dying Star – James Webb Space Telescope
(lemmy.world)
Editor’s Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope obtained images of the Ring Nebula, one of the best-known examples of a planetary nebula. Much like the Southern Ring Nebula, one of Webb’s first images, the Ring Nebula displays intricate structures of the final stages of a dying star. Roger Wesson from Cardiff University tells us more about this phase of a Sun-like star’s stellar lifecycle and how Webb observations have given him and his colleagues valuable insights into the formation and evolution of these objects, hinting at a key role for binary companions.
A new image of the galaxy cluster known as “El Gordo” is revealing distant and dusty objects never seen before, and providing a bounty of fresh science. The infrared image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, displays a variety of unusual, distorted background galaxies that were only hinted at in previous Hubble Space Telescope images.
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