Gaze Slack-jawed at the Haunting Beauty of Galaxy NGC 1566, Captured by JWST, Processed by Judy Schmidt

By Nancy Atkinson November 28, 2022
Gaze Slack-jawed at the Haunting Beauty of Galaxy NGC 1566, Captured by JWST, Processed by Judy Schmidt

Here's an absolutely stunning new view from the James Webb Space Telescope of a dusty spiral galaxy, NGC 1566. Amateur (but expert!) image editor Judy Schmidt took the raw data from JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and teased out this eerie, spider-web-like view of this distant galaxy. The swirling and symmetrical arms are so full of dust that not many stars are visible.

The reddish areas correspond with star formation, however, Schmidt explained, which shows how the physics of star formation is intertwined with the amount of dust and gas in a galaxy. Additionally, the small central nucleus of NGC 1566 is extremely bright, which is a telltale sign of it being among the Seyfert class of galaxies. The centers of these galaxies are very active and luminous, emitting strong bursts of radiation and potentially harboring supermassive black holes that could be many millions of times the mass of the Sun.

NGC 1566 is located approximately 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado. This is an intermediate spiral galaxy, which means its shape is somewhere between a barred spiral galaxy (like our Milky Way) and a regular spiral galaxy.

https://twitter.com/SpaceGeck/status/1596242020464410624

Schmidt said on Twitter that the muted colors in this image come from the various emission of dust.

“I had to increase the saturation tremendously to make it colorful at all. The separation is not very much otherwise,” she said, adding that this all “took a bit of doing this time because the pipeline images available from the archive had a lot of alignment issues. I had to manually mosaic this.”

The image comes from JWST's Early Release Program, where immediate access is available to data from specific science observations from JWST, completed within the first five months of the telescope's science operations.

Compare JWST’s mid-infrared view with an earlier Hubble image taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.

This Hubble image shows NGC 1566, taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com