The Cartwheel Galaxy Is the Webb Telescope’s Latest Cosmic Snapshot - The New York Times

Scientists on Tuesday published the latest images from NASA’s triumphant James Webb Space Telescope.

The new images come on the heels of NASA’s July 12 unveiling of five initial scenes captured by the Webb telescope, the most powerful space observatory built to date.

But it is best known from the Hubble Space Telescope, which produced images in the 1990s with more details of the galaxy’s makeup.

And just as the Webb, in July, revealed the presence of even more distant galaxies hiding from our view, its photographs of Cartwheel magnified the detailed formation of stars within the galaxy’s rings and the dozens of other star systems beyond.

“We guess that the Cartwheel probably started out looking something like the Milky Way, and then this other galaxy moved through,” said Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of the near-infrared camera, or NIRCam, one of the Webb telescope’s scientific instruments.

After the observation of the cosmic object in the 1990s, the scientists noticed a trail of hydrogen gas left behind that was following the smaller galaxy, which Dr.

While colorful, Joseph DePasquale, a senior science visuals developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Webb and Hubble spacecraft, emphasized that the stars and dust are actually detected as infrared light instead of colors.

When Hubble captured Cartwheel in the 1990s, the galaxy’s “spokes” were obscured by gas clouds that scattered light, making it hard to see the thousands of stars forming within.