Referral: “GOALS-JWST: Hidden Star Formation and Extended PAH Emission in the Luminous Infrared Galaxy VV 114” by Aaron S. Evans, David Frayer, Vassilis Charmandaris, Lee Armus, Hanae Inami, Jason Surace, Sean Linden, Baruch Soifer, Tanio Diaz-Santos, Kirsten Larson, Jeffrey Rich, Yiqing Song, Loreto Barcos-Munoz, Joseph Mazzarella, George Privon, Vivian U, Anne Medling, Torsten Boeker, Susanne Aalto, Kazushi Iwasawa, Justin Howell, Paul van der Werf, Philip N. Appleton, Thomas Bohn, Michael Brown, Christopher Hayward, Shunshi Hoshioka, Francisca Kemper, Thomas Lai, David Law, Matthew Malkan, Jason Marshall, Eric Murphy, David Sanders and Sabrina Stierwalt, Submitted, Astrophysical Journal Letters.arXiv:2208.14507.
MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally moneyed European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.
NIRSpec was developed for the European Space Agency (ESA) by a consortium of European business led by Airbus Defence and Space (ADS) with NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center offering its detector and micro-shutter subsystems.
Results based upon this observation of IC 1623 have been released in the Astrophysical Journal.
The merger of these two galaxies has actually long been of interest to astronomers,. It has actually previously been imaged by Hubble and by other space telescopes. The continuous, severe starburst causes extreme infrared emission, and the merging galaxies might well remain in the procedure of forming a supermassive great void. A thick band of dust has obstructed these important insights from the view of telescopes like Hubble. Webbs infrared level of sensitivity and its impressive resolution at those wavelengths enables it to see past the dust and has resulted in the amazing image at the top of this article, which is a combination of MIRI and NIRCam images.
The two galaxies in IC 1623 are plunging headlong into one another in a procedure known as a galaxy merger. Here, the Webb Picture of the Month of merging galaxies IC 1623 A and B is juxtaposed with a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble and Webb NIRCAM images show the galaxies distorted spiral arms, while MIRI reveals the faint ghostly glow of interstellar dust. This communicating galaxy system is particularly intense at infrared wavelengths, making it a perfect proving ground for NASA/ESA/CSA Webbs capability to study luminous galaxies. The luminescent core of the galaxy merger turns out to be both highly compact and extremely intense, so much so that Webbs diffraction spikes appear atop the galaxy in this image.
The two galaxies swirl into a single chaotic object in the. Long, blue spiral arms stretch vertically, faint at the edges. Hot gas spreads horizontally over that, generally intense red with numerous small gold spots of star development. The core of the merging galaxies is really intense and radiates eight big, golden diffraction spikes. The background is black, with numerous tiny galaxies in orange and blue. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & & CSA, L. Armus &
A. Evans This image from the James Webb Space Telescope showcases a braided set of engaging galaxies known as IC 1623. It lies around 270 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. The two galaxies in IC 1623 are plunging headlong into one another in a process called a galaxy merger. A frenzied spate of star development was sparked by their crash. This is understood as a starburst and is producing new stars at a rate more than twenty times that of the Milky Way galaxy.
Here, the Webb Picture of the Month of combining galaxies IC 1623 A and B is juxtaposed with a brand-new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble and Webb NIRCAM images reveal the galaxies distorted spiral arms, while MIRI reveals the faint ghostly radiance of interstellar dust. This engaging galaxy system is particularly intense at infrared wavelengths, making it a perfect proving ground for NASA/ESA/CSA Webbs capability to study luminescent galaxies.
The luminescent core of the galaxy merger turns out to be both extremely compact and really bright, a lot so that Webbs diffraction spikes appear atop the galaxy in this image. The 8-pronged, snowflake-like diffraction spikes are developed by the interaction of starlight with the physical structure of the telescope. The spiky quality of Webbs observations is particularly obvious in images including intense stars, such as Webbs very first deep field image.