After the world saw the first photos of James Webb, the space telescope began its scientific mission and sent another image that looks no less impressive than the previous ones. The new image shows the dusty “skeleton” of the distant galaxy NGC 628, more like a terrible psychedelic whirlpool from a Marvel movie than a spiral galaxy.
“This galaxy is probably very similar to our Milky Way from the outside,” Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, commented on the image on Twitter.
Let’s just see what JWST observed yesterday…
Oh, good god. pic.twitter.com/8UQWi2zPlR— gbrammer (@gbrammer) July 18, 2022
James Webb took a picture of NGC 628 on July 17 and sent it to Earth for registration in the MAST archive, where space data is collected that is publicly available to anyone, including the public.
These spiral arms of NGC 628 have been photographed before. But the images of the galaxy taken in the visible optical range by the Hubble Space Telescope are not at all similar to the detailed purple spiral structure seen in the James Webb image in the mid-infrared range.
Earlier we explained why in the images of the James Webb Telescope the stars look pointed with eight spikes.
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