Webb telescope sees once invisible structures inside spiral galaxies | CNN

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to peer inside the heart of spiral galaxies, where young stars carve out glowing paths.

The space observatory can see the universe in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, making the telescope uniquely poised to look through the dust that obscures some galactic features when less powerful telescopes are used. n visible light, the galaxies appeared dark and dim. But Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument was able to see the ways that stars and star clusters can shape galactic structure. The never-before-seen details captured in the Webb images show how these intricate networks within galaxies are influenced over time as stars form and evolve.

“We are directly seeing how the energy from the formation of young stars affects the gas around them, and it’s just remarkable,” said Erik Rosolowsky, a PHANGS team member and an associate professor of physics at the University of Alberta in Canada, in a statement.