If you’re still wondering about the first release of full-color James Webb Space Telescope images, you’re not alone.
The first image was unveiled to us this week, soon followed by four other brand new images that show our universe in never-before-seen detail – and we can hardly stop staring at them.
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But there is one very important detail that we missed at first glance!
The Southern Ring Nebula is tucked away in the upper left of the images in what looks like a streak of light – but is actually a side view of the galaxy.
“I bet ‘it’s part of the nebula,'” NASA astronomer Carl Gordon said during the image’s unveiling, Business Insider reported. ] and looked more closely at both the MIRI [Mid-Infrared Instrument] images, and this is clearly an edge-on galaxy.”
Not only does it look cool, but this approach should allow astronomers to study how stars are distributed throughout the galaxy.
In case you missed it yesterday, what you’re seeing are spectacular death plumes from the Southern Ring Nebula – a massive cloud of dust and gas located about 2,000 light-years away.
It has two stars in its center. The fainter is a white dwarf – the collapsed wind of a dead star – that, during its lifetime, was eight times the mass of the Sun.
It reached the end of its life, blew off its outer layers, and the core collapsed into an ultradense object: 1.4 times the mass of the Sun packed into an Earth-sized object.
For the first time, JWST has been able to show that this star is shrouded in dust.
The bright star is in the early stages of its evolution and will one day explode into its own nebula.
At left, JWST’s near-infrared camera shows bubbly orange hydrogen from the newly formed expansion, as well as a blue haze of hot ionized gas from the remnant hot core of the dead star.
At right, in an image taken by JWST’s mid-infrared instrument, blue hydrocarbons form patterns similar to the orange ones in the previous image, as they accumulate on the surface of hydrogen dust rings.
