Following the previous first wave of images, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has turned its gaze to the Wheel galaxy 500 million light-years away. As its name suggests, the most obvious feature of the Wheel Galaxy is that there is a high-density “axis” in the center, and a ring of stars on the periphery, which are connected by radial “spokes”, which are very similar to the wheels of a wheel. look.
According to scientists’ guesses, the axis galaxy was originally a fairly ordinary spiral galaxy, but about 200 million years ago, there was a small galaxy passing through the center of the axis galaxy, and the gravitational waves generated when passing through were like throwing Like the stones in the pond, a “ripple” was created on the original plane of the galaxy, expanding outward. This expanding gravitational wave squeezes the surrounding dust clouds, triggering them to collapse into stars, creating a ring of star-forming belts that expand outward, now known as the “ring”, while the radial spokes are part of the astronomical Home is considered a spiral arm in reconstruction.
However, because the wheel galaxy is too far away, although the previous Hubble photos can see the basic structure, it is not so clear about the distribution of stars and dust clouds. Now with JWST, astronomers can use the near-infrared wavelength to better see the star distribution of the galaxy, and use the mid-infrared wavelength to highlight the spokes, and found that the spokes are actually composed of silicon dust, similar to the composition of the earth.
In addition to the Axle galaxy, JWST also aimed its lens at a planet named Earendel. The star, discovered by Hubble in March this year, was refracted from very far away through the gravitational lensing of a group of galaxies called WHL0137-08. It is currently the most distant single star known, with an estimated distance of 28 billion light-years away, nearly twice the previous record, but due to the insufficient resolution of Hubble, its properties cannot be measured more accurately, even In fact, it is not even sure if it is a single planet. Now that it’s JWST’s turn, we should be able to obtain Earendel’s spectrum. In addition to further confirming the distance, we can finally know if it is really a single star.