James Webb takes a picture of a galaxy 3 million light years from Earth
The British newspaper “Daily Mail” revealed that the James Webb Space Telescope captured a picture of a “lonely” galaxy, 3 million light-years from Earth.
According to the newspaper, the image shows details that have not been seen before, showing thousands of ancient stars twinkling within the region.
The dwarf galaxy was seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope "Wolf-Lundmark-Milot" (WLM) in 2016, but its instruments could not capture the details captured by James Webb, and the images showed the stars as blurry.
The report pointed out that by using James Webb's powerful mechanics, NASA hopes to reconstruct the history of star formation for this galaxy that it believes formed billions of years ago - not long after the Big Bang. The Milky Way - something that has never been possible until now.
NASA said on Twitter: "Compared to previous space observatory images, James Webb's NIRCam image makes the whole place shine."
The NIRCM (Near Infrared Camera) is said to be able to detect light from the oldest stars and galaxies.
According to the paper, this observation was taken as part of James Webb's Early Release Science (ERS) program, which focused on degenerate star populations (a star population is a group of stars within a galaxy that are similar to each other in spatial distribution, chemical composition, and metallicity, and have the same the age).
The dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte was chosen for this program because its gas is similar to the gas that made up galaxies in the early universe, which means James Webb can differentiate between its individual stars.
The Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte galaxy is located in the vicinity of the Milky Way, but it is ten times smaller than our galaxy.
Although Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte is relatively close to our Milky Way, it is fairly isolated and does not interact with other systems, according to Kristin McEwen of Rutgers University, one of the principal scientists at Early Release Science.
Source: websites