Nasa’s New Webb Telescope Shows Close-Up Look At The ‘Phantom Galaxy’

Space exploration has come a long way in the past few decades, and NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope is revealing never-before-seen images of deep space.

When the Hubble telescope was launched in 1990, researchers and hobbyists alike were awed by the incredible images the telescope captured of space – images that could never been seen with the naked eye from Earth.

But NASA’s new telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, is putting the Hubble’s images to shame. NASA first revealed some of its images on social media on July 11, 2022, and people couldn’t get enough.

On July 12, 2022, NASA followed up by sharing even more photos from the telescope, images that awed the public and excited scientists.

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But the photos didn’t stop there.

One image captured by the telescope is of a galaxy known as NGC629, also called the Phantom Galaxy.

Astronomical image processor Judy Schmidt shared a photo of the Phantom Galaxy, as captured by the Webb telescope, on Flickr. She captioned the image: “Squeezing some color out of the various filters showing all the glowing dust in the center of NGC628.”

Photo: flickr/Judy Schmidt

Twitter user @gbrammer shared another image of the Phantom Galaxy, but with a unique color scheme. Using raw data of the image, he was able to tweak the photo with filters to bring out the purple hues.

As he explained in the thread, the galaxy’s molecular makeup allow the photo filters to pick up the different colors, and in this case, it was purple.

Some of the images captured by the Webb telescope are of things the Hubble telescope has previously photographed. However, the differences between the telescope images are like night and day.

Software developer John Christensen shared an image of the Southern Ring Nebula that shows the same image taken by Hubble and Webb. You can check out the tool he made to compare the two here.

Quite an impressive difference, isn’t it?

In addition to enhancing our images of galaxies we know about, the Webb telescope is also discovering new things. In fact, New Scientist reported on July 20, 2022 that the Webb Space Telescope had just found the “oldest galaxy humans have ever observed in the universe.”

The galaxy broke the record for the oldest observed galaxy by 100,000 million years!

You can learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope by visiting its official website!

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