An extraordinary image of the centre of the spiral galaxy NGC 628 taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has drawn comparisons to a Doctor Who vortex, but it could reveal important clues about how dust behaves in galaxies.

The image is a composite of three sets of data at different wavelengths taken by JWST’s mid-infrared instrument team. Gabriel Brammer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who isn’t affiliated with the team, downloaded the data and translated each of the infrared wavelengths to red, green and blue before combining them to produce one image.

NGC 628 has been imaged with visible light by other telescopes, including Hubble, and looks similar to our own Milky Way if viewed from above the galactic plane. But JWST’s ability to observe infrared light in high resolution reveals a hidden structure. “If our eyes could see in these mid-infrared wavelengths, the night sky would look a lot more like this picture, which I think would be spectacular, maybe a little terrifying,” says Brammer.

Scientists report that damage to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) caused by a micrometeoroid impact in late May 2022 may be more severe than previously believed.

A group of scientists evaluated the performance of the space telescope throughout its commissioning phase in a new report released last week following Webb’s amazing first photographs.

In this video, explore the various superdense remnants of massive stars, which hold between 1 and 3 times the Sun’s mass and are so dense that a teaspoon of their matter weighs about a billion tons.

Read and share your comments on this article.

Tianwen-1 is a historic victory for both the CNSA and space exploration.

Upon successful orbital insertion and landing, Tianwen-1 became a historic victory for the CNSA and space exploration. Before Tianwen-1, the only two successful missions to send an orbiter and lander to Mars were NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 missions in 1975. Prior to that, the Soviet Union had attempted this feat with their Mars 2 and 3 missions in 1971 and Mars 6 in 1973.

Mars 2 was an outright failure, with the lander being destroyed and the orbiter sending back no data. On Mars 3, the orbiter obtained approximately eight months of data, and while the lander touched down safely, it only returned 20 seconds of data. On Mars 6, the orbiter produced data from an occultation experiment, but the lander failed on the descent.

On July 8th, NASA released a list of targets of nebulas and galaxies that will be revealed on July 12th, when the space agency debuts the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope.