New from Webb - NGC 7496 spiral galaxy

Fresh from being processed from newest JWST data by the PHANGS (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS) surey team, here's a stunning infrared view (combined with visible data from the Hubble) of the spiral galaxy NGC 7496:


Full-resolution: Link
Credit: Judy Schmidt / NASA / ESA / CSA

Member of the team said on Twitter:

Our #phangs team was up in the early morning with @SpaceGeck waiting to download our 1st!! @NASAWebb obs... data are just ✨miraculous✨ lighting up dark dust lanes, revealing earliest stages of star formation in detail & ALL THAT FEEDBACK #pinwheelonfire #ngc7496

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The author of the image Judy Schmidt says:

This was all done in a major rush, so I'm hoping to come up with some alternative and possibly even better views at some later time. 😁 This is a combination of JWST/MIRI data and an HST version I had already processed a while back.

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a reply to: wildespace

Every image being released is like Christmas morning!

Fantastic and humbling. Thanks for sharing!



⭐+🇺🇸

a reply to: wildespace

Thanks for the image. Looks great!!

JWST is going to create a lot of new PC desktop background material, I'm sensing.

a reply to: wildespace

That is simply stunning, I'd almost liken that to a cosmic "fingerprint", for the lack of a better way to describe it.


Any plans to image Andromeda or the Pleiades? I haven't checked to see what's on the list for areas to image, so I'm just going to go with "Sure hope they do!"

Somewhere out there is an abundance of life as we know it. We just gotta find it. We are not alone.

a reply to: wildespace

That's a great composition , really shows off the structure of the Galaxy.

I find the structure of the , I presume , Star formation upper middle right particularly fascinating.

Thanks for the stars and flags everyone, it's gonna be a very busy few weeks for the science teams that use JWST right now!

Here's the same observation, but in pure MIRI and NIRCam:

Here's a version of NGC7496 with both MIRI and NIRCam. So now we can see the stars and the glowing dust. It's practically all light and no shadows. #phangs

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originally posted by: Nyiah
a reply to: wildespace
Any plans to image Andromeda or the Pleiades?

Both of these are HUGE in size in the night sky, while JWST has a very tiny view. Making a mosaic of JWST images of the Andromeda would probably take massive amounts of observation time and data returned. The Pleiades is just some stars with interstellar dust around them. I suppose JWST could take a little peak at a small area of that.
I hear JWST's area of sight is like a grain of rice if you hold it in an outstretched hand. The Andromeda is six times the width of the full moon.

a reply to: wildespace

I think I actually prefer this view better than the first one that has the red hues from IR spectrum. You can really get a sense of how luminous the center of the galaxy is. Imagine how much energy and how bright the object in the galaxy's center is to create such lens flare from such a massive distance.

originally posted by: SleeperHasAwakened
a reply to: wildespace

I think I actually prefer this view better than the first one that has the red hues from IR spectrum. You can really get a sense of how luminous the center of the galaxy is. Imagine how much energy and how bright the object in the galaxy's center is to create such lens flare from such a massive distance.

That would be a Supermassive Black Hole, with hydrogen and other stuff madly circling around it (and into it) emitting massive amounts of energy.
I've seen videos on Youtube where astrophysicists squeal with delight at seeing these super-bright galactic centres in the new JWST images, because it confirms that there's a supermassive black hole there.