The European Space Agency has captured a marvelous galaxy whose shape is familiar to us.
The Milky Way, our galaxy, is not the only one in the universe to display this spiral shape. And for proof, we can rely on a magnificent shot which was taken in the constellation of Hercules and which shows us a splendid copy of our good old stellar shelter.
A simple calibration exercise
The James Webb Telescope has been in the news lately, reluctantly, when Google’s new chatbot, Bard, falsely claimed he was the one who captured the first image of an exoplanet. A failure for an AI already criticized, since this discovery originated from the VLT Yepun.
But we will not stop at this simple error when we talk about the telescope launched on December 25, 2021 by NASA, with the participation of the European Space Agency. Indeed, while it was still in the calibration phase and its first scientific quality image was only produced in July 2022, it had a nice surprise in store for us, taken on May 22, 2022: the photo of the twin sister of our Milky Way!
The beautiful LEDA 2046648
A sublime galaxy, which you can admire at the top of this article, has been named LEDA 2046648. This stellar object was spotted within the constellation of Hercules by the European Space Agency, at an impressive distance of 1 billion light years. We can also observe many other galaxies all around, some of which have the same spiral structure as the object of wonder that interests us today.
We can also note that several objects discernible on this picture could come to us from the bottom of the ages, with a potential age of barely 300 million years after the Big Bang! The James Webb Space Telescope thus continues to delight us and teach us more about the universe. In particular, it had detected CO2 on an exoplanet and unveiled images of the Pillars of Creation.
Source : Engadget
4