NASA James Webb Telescope captures awesome Cartwheel Galaxy 500 mn light years from Earth

NASA has just unveiled the latest image from the $10 billion infrared space observatory James Webb Space Telescope and it’s breathtaking! This time, the world’s largest telescope has captured the image of the Cartwheel Galaxy spinning ring of color in unprecedented clarity. Though the new image resembles a wheel of an old carriage, previously studied by the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb’s infrared gaze has captured some unseen details in the galaxy’s structure. The new images captured by Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI, reveals the individual stars within the star-forming regions in the outer ring of the Cartwheel galaxy. It also shows clusters of very young stars around the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole shrouded in dust.

According to NASA, the Cartwheel galaxy is located around 500 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor. It gained its shape during a spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies which created two rings expanding from the galaxy’s center, “like ripples in a pond after a stone is tossed into it,” said the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in a statement. There is a smaller white ring closer to the galaxy’s center, while the outer ring, with its explosion of color, has been expanding into the universe for around 440 million years.

The image captured by Webb Telescope also displays the areas rich in hydrocarbons and silicate dust, connecting the inner and outer ring. Earlier, the Hubble Space Telescope, too, examined the Cartwheel, but it was shrouded in mystery due to the amount of dust that obscures the view. The new NASA telescope’s observations make these features much clearer, STScI said.

The Cartwheel galaxy is still transforming due to the crash, and the new observations will give insights into its past and future evolution.