Gobsmacking Image of a Stellar Nursery
Wow, check out this just-released image from the JWST team of star cluster NGC 602.
The local environment of this cluster is a close analogue of what existed in the early Universe, with very low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest the presence of ongoing star formation processes. This cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine star formation scenarios under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighbourhood.
It is very worth your time to click through and look at this image in all of its massive celestial glory. I found this image via Phil Plait, who calls it “one of the most jaw-droppingly mind stomping images I’ve seen from JWST” and, directing us back to the science (remember the science?!), notes that NGC 602 is actively forming stars (it’s only about 5 million years old) and that it depicts “the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way”. Cool!
Discussion 6 comments
I've lost the ability to understand what these images are any more. Are they real, like images from a light microscope? Or are they computer generated, like images from an electron microscope? They're so strange and beautiful I can't ever understand them.
I'm sure I'm not even asking the right question or using the correct terms. But… I don't know, somehow these are abstract enough that they may as well be AI-generated for me. They seem too unreal for my brain to accept.
There's quite a bit of artistic license in many astronomical photos, particularly if what they are depicting is not entirely in the human visual spectrum. In this case, "this image includes data from Webb's NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) and MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument)" so that's not what you would see peering out into space with your human eyes.
Thanks!
It's generally assigning color to wavelengths of light that we can't see. They'll take multiple images in different wavelengths and then layer them on top of each other. Sometimes they'll combine visible light images from other telescopes. Or it could be "light" in the radio frequencies. Technically it's all light because it's carried by photons.
Due to the expansion of the universe, the light hitting the JWST is in those non-visible to the human eye wavelengths, but when it left the stars we are observing it was generally in more visible light ranges. As stated, many of the JWST and Hubble images have colors added based on differentiating the wavelengths received, but as JWST is looking back in time billions of years, and the universe has expanded so greatly since then, the infrared it receives was largely visible light when it left the stars and galaxies JWST is imaging. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1bopcms/what_are_the_true_colors_of_images_from_the_james/
(Also, Radio Telescopes which capture the cosmic microwave background radiation are probably grabbing what was once visible or near visible light, and there's efforts to use even lower frequency radio wave "telescopes" to try to peer even close to the big bang...)
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