Stars carve out new galaxies in images from the James Webb Telescope

A gaggle of galaxies crackle with intricate detail in new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. JWST’s sharp infrared eyes show how newborn stars shape their environments, suggesting how stars and galaxies grow together.

“We just exploded,” says Janice Lee, an astrologer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She and more than 100 other astronomers reported the first sighting of these galaxies with JWST in a special February issue. Astrophysical Literary Journal.

Before JWST is launched in December 2021, Lee and his colleagues selected 19 galaxies that, if observed through a telescope, they thought could show new unique stellar life courses (SN: 1/24/22). These galaxies are close to each other, within 65 million light-years of the Milky Way, and all have different types of spiral structures. The team had observed the galaxy with many observations, but parts of the galaxy had always looked flat and shapeless.

“When” [JWST], we see structure down to the smallest scales,” Lee said. “For the first time, we’re seeing very small sites of star formation in a lot of these galaxies.”

In the new images, the faces of the galaxies are marked by dark voids, between burning flames of gas and dust. Comparisons to Hubble Space Telescope images reveal that these empty bubbles were carved out of vapor and dust by high-energy radiation from the stars at their centers.

Then, when those massive stars reach the end of their lives and explode, that gas is released even more. Some of the larger bubbles have smaller bubbles at their edges, which indicate places where the gas of a dying star has started to build new stars.

Comparing these processes in different types of spiral galaxies will help astronomers understand how the shapes and properties of galaxies influence the life cycles of their stars, and how galaxies grow and change with their stellar carriers.

“We just studied the first few” [of the 19 selected] galaxies, Lee said. “We need to study these things in full scale to understand how the environment changes…how stars are born.”