Cartwheel Galaxy - MIRI Compass Image
by Eric Glaser
Title
Cartwheel Galaxy - MIRI Compass Image
Artist
Eric Glaser
Medium
Photograph - Digital Photography
Description
"Cartwheel Galaxy (MIRI Compass Image)"
Release Date: August 2, 2022
About This Image:
Image of the Cartwheel Galaxy, along with two smaller companion galaxies, captured by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.
The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).
The scale bar is labeled in light-years, which is the distance that light travels in one Earth-year. (It takes 100,000 years for light to travel a distance equal to the length of the bar.) One light-year is equal to about 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. The field of view shown in this image is approximately 305,000 light-years across.
This image shows invisible mid-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colors. The color key shows which MIRI filters were used when collecting the light. The color of each filter name is the visible light color used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.
More information:
This image from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) shows a group of galaxies, including a large distorted ring-shaped galaxy known as the Cartwheel. The Cartwheel Galaxy, located 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is composed of a bright inner ring and an active outer ring. While this outer ring has a lot of star formation, the dusty area in between reveals many stars and star clusters.
The mid-infrared light captured by MIRI reveals fine details about these dusty regions and young stars within the Cartwheel Galaxy, which are rich in hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds, as well as silicate dust, like much of the dust on Earth.
Young stars, many of which are present in the bottom right of the outer ring, energize surrounding hydrocarbon dust, causing it to glow orange. On the other hand, the clearly defined dust between the core and the outer ring, which forms the “spokes” that inspire the galaxy’s name, is mostly silicate dust.
The smaller spiral galaxy to the upper left of Cartwheel displays much of the same behavior, showing a large amount of star formation.
MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.
Image and Text Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Webb ERO Production Team
Additional image editing by Eric Glaser
Uploaded
August 20th, 2022
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