Telescopes

A part of the galaxy NGC 5068 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team)

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An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows the core and part of a spiral arm of the galaxy NGC 5068. Two instruments, MIRI and NIRCam, were used to examine this barred spiral galaxy, and the various infrared filters allowed to detect an enormous amount of detail among dusty structures and star-forming areas where there are newborn stars still surrounded by shells of gas and dust.

About 20 million light-years from Earth, the galaxy NGC 5068 belongs to the most common class in the universe, spiral galaxies. The presence of a star formation extending from the core in a shape resembling a bar places it in the subclass of the barred spiral galaxies, which probably make up about two-thirds of their class.

An artist's impression of the exoplanet WASP-18b and the spectrum of thermal emissions detected by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRISS instrument at wavelengths between 0.85 and 2.8 microns

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the results of an examination of the exoplanet WASP-18b. A team of researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to map the temperatures on the surface of this ultra-hot Jupiter very close to its star. The temperature variations are around 1,000° Kelvin between the hottest area always facing its star and the border area between day and night. Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) also found traces of water vapor that other instruments had missed.

The Lupus 3 molecular cloud

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An image captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile shows the star-forming interstellar cloud cataloged as Lupus 3. Full of activity, it contains protostars that are literally breaking out of their cocoon of gas and dust such as HR 5999 and HR 6000, in the center of the image. The light of those very young stars illuminates the reflection nebula cataloged as Bernes 149. This area is in the cosmic neighborhood, so it’s observed all the time, sometimes obtaining breathtaking images of newborn stars and protostars.

Artist impression of a black hole accretion (Image courtesy John A. Paice)

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Two articles, one published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” and one in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”, report as many studies on what was defined as the largest cosmic explosion ever detected. Two teams of researchers studied the data collected with various instruments regarding the event cataloged as AT2021lwx offering two different hypotheses for its cause. Both teams believe that a supermassive black hole about 8 billion light-years from Earth caused that explosion but disagree on what triggered it: one team points to a cloud of gas and dust being violently swallowed while the other team points to a tidal disruption event where a star being devoured.

The region Lupus 2 (Image ESO/Meingast et al.)

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports an overview of the results of the VISTA Star Formation Atlas (VISIONS) survey, which aimed to observe star formation regions visible from the southern hemisphere. A team of researchers assembled more than one million infrared images captured over five years by ESO’s VISTA telescope in Chile to create an atlas of five stellar nurseries in the cosmic neighborhood. This is one of the surveys focused on star formation processes with the aim of better understanding its various phases.