Webb is giving astronomers an unprecedented look of the fine details and 3D structure of the dust and gas between the stars.
The space between the stars is not empty, but rather filled with filaments of dust and gas (known as the interstellar medium), which is often invisible until something illuminates it. Here, a long-ago supernova explosion, acting like a flashbulb, has heated some of this interstellar material, causing it to glow in the infrared, creating a thermal “light echo.”
The structures in these filaments are on a remarkably small scale of about 400 astronomical units, or less than one-hundredth of a light-year. (An astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-Sun distance and is equal to 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)
Webb observed this light echo in the vicinity of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A three separate times, in essence creating a 3D scan of the interstellar material. Note that the field of view in the top row is rotated slightly clockwise relative to the middle and bottom rows, due to the roll angle of the Webb telescope when the observations were taken.
Read more: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-reveals-intrica...
(Note: the black region of the image is where there is no data.)
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Jencson (Caltech/IPAC)
Image description: Three rows show Webb images of the same region taken on three different dates. The top row is labeled August 19, 2024. The middle row is labeled September 16, 2024. The bottom row is labeled September 30, 2024. Each row shows two images split by a vertical black bar where there is no data. Each image is speckled with dozens of white stars, some showing Webb’s signature 8-point diffraction spikes, against the black background of space. The images also show tightly packed, glowing red filaments that resemble muscle fibers or wood grain. While the background stars are the same in every row, the filaments change noticeably. In the top row, the filaments extend horizontally from upper left to lower right. In the middle and bottom rows, the filaments extend from lower left to upper right, and seem to shift slightly downward in position, with the last the lowest.
Tags: jwst webb james webb space telescope cass A light echo infrared
A team of astronomers sifted through James Webb Space Telescope data from multiple surveys to compile one of the largest samples of “little red dots” (LRDs) to date. The team started with the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey before widening their scope to other extragalactic legacy fields, including the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) and the Next Generation Deep Extragalactic Exploratory Public (NGDEEP) survey.
From their sample, they found that these mysterious red objects that appear small on the sky emerge in large numbers around 600 million years after the big bang and undergo a rapid decline in quantity around 1.5 billion years after the big bang. Spectroscopic data of some of the LRDs in their sample, provided by the Red Unknowns: Bright Infrared Extragalactic Survey (RUBIES), suggests that many are accreting black holes. However, further study of these intriguing objects is required.
Read more: go.nasa.gov/3CkPYWi
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College)
Image Description: Six Webb images of little red dots are combined in a two-row mosaic. Each little red dot is centered within a square frame and lies against the black background of space. Each dot has a yellow-white circular core surrounded by a red, fuzzy ring. White text in the top left corner of each box lists the source’s name from the Webb surveys, and its redshift. From left to right, the top row reads CEERS 14448, z = 4.75; NGDEEP 4321, z = 8.92; and PRIMER-COS 10539, z = 7.48. The bottom row reads CEERS 20320, z = 5.27; JADES 9186, z = 4.99; and PRIMER-UDS 17818, z = 6.40.
Tags: jwst nasa webb james webb space telescope early universe
Like images of broken light, Webb captured these carbon-rich dust shells around a binary star system. Drifting swiftly outwards, they are seeding their surroundings with carbon - one way elements spread across the universe. science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/webb-watches-carbon-rich-d...
Wolf-Rayet 140 contains two massive stars that follow a tight, elongated orbit. (In these images, they are within the central white dot.) As they swing past each other, their stellar winds collide, compressing and forming these rings of carbon-rich dust. Though many events in space take place over vast timescales, these rings (Webb spotted 17 of them) are moving outward from their stars at more than 1600 miles/s, making them noticeably different from one year to the next. Like clockwork, the stars’ winds generate dust for several months every eight years, as the pair make their closest approach to each other. Webb shows where dust formation stops — look for the darker region at top left of the images. The dust here isn’t uniform. In places it has “piled up” in amorphous clouds as large as our whole solar system; other individual particles float freely. The spread of this carbon-rich dust into the galactic neighborhood is key for the formation of solar systems like ours. Some of these dust shells have persisted for more than 130 years, and this system could generate tens of thousands of shells over hundreds of thousands of years. Ultimately, massive stars end their lives in a supernova explosion, likely the fate of Wolf-Rayet 140.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Science: Emma Lieb (University of Denver), Ryan Lau (NSF NOIRLab), Jennifer Hoffman (University of Denver)
Image description: A three-part graphic. The left and center images show two observations of Wolf-Rayet 140, from July 2022 at left and from September 2023 at center. Both show a bright white point of light surrounded by 17 regularly spaced, hazy dust shells at the bottom, right, and upper right. The panels each have an outline of a square overlayed toward the top right, which has a brighter white outline of a triangle. At left, the triangle points up and is labeled a. At right, the triangle points down and is labeled b. The third panel at right shows a magnified version of the areas outlined in the left and center panels. There are two labels. At top left, a, and at bottom right, b. It is very obvious that the arced orange shells do not perfectly match in the middle where they are spliced together. The arcs at left appear lower, and the arcs at right all appear higher. Each arc lines up for about half its width.
Since antiquity, wreaths have symbolized the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is fitting then that one of the best places for astronomers to learn more about the stellar lifecycle resembles a giant holiday wreath itself.
The star cluster NGC 602 lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in NGC 602 have fewer heavier elements compared to the Sun and most of the rest of the galaxy. Instead, the conditions within NGC 602 mimic those for stars found billions of years ago when the universe was much younger.
This new image combines data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with a previously released image from the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope. The dark ring-like outline of the wreath seen in Webb data (represented as orange, yellow, green, and blue) is made up of dense clouds of filled dust.
Meanwhile, X-rays from Chandra (red) show young, massive stars that are illuminating the wreath, sending high-energy light into interstellar space. These X-rays are powered by winds flowing from the young, massive stars that are sprinkled throughout the cluster. The extended cloud in the Chandra data likely comes from the overlapping X-ray glow of thousands of young, low-mass stars in the cluster.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand
Image description: A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-colored gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright.
Tags: NGC 602
Even in space, connections are important.
This image of NGC 2566 is part of an observing program dedicated to understanding the connections between stars, gas and dust in nearby star-forming galaxies. Read more: esawebb.org/images/potm2412a/
Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy
Image description: An oval-shaped spiral galaxy, seen close-up. Its core is a compact, pale spot that glows brightly, filling the disc with bluish light. Faint strands of pale reddish dust swirl out from the core to the far sides of the disc. They each join up with an arm of thick, cloudy, red dust with brighter orange patches, that follows the edge of the disc around to the opposite end and a little off the galaxy.