James Webb sent a new awfully impressive photo of a spiral galaxy

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.

An image of the galaxy NGC 628 in the mid-infrared range, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 17 without preprocessing. Authorship: Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen in collaboration with PHANGS-JWST

“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.

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.

Image of the galaxy M74

Earlier we explained why in the images of the James Webb Telescope the stars look pointed with eight spikes.

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