NASA showed 19 galaxies closest to us

NASA has released stunning images of 19 spiral galaxies near our Milky Way galaxy. The James Webb Space Telescope helped them complete years of observations.

This telescope operates in the near and mid-infrared, capturing radiation from heated gas and dust. Interstellar gas and dust absorb light in the visible and ultraviolet ranges and, when heated, glow in the infrared spectrum, indicating their position and structure in space.

Before James Webb, the Hubble Optical Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), and the MUSE spectroscopic instrument at the Very Large Observatory in Chile, which also operates in ultraviolet light, collected data on 19 nearby spiral galaxies. But James Webb completed these observations as part of the PHANGS project, adding observations in the near and mid-infrared.

^{Galaxy NGC 628}

All 19 observed galaxies are located between 30 and 80 million light years away. They were selected from a variety of other galaxies to provide the best angle for study; all of them are facing our galaxy and can reveal its structure in every detail.

Along with images of galaxies, the PHANGS project team published a catalog of nearly 100,000 star clusters observed within them. The material turned out to be so voluminous that one team would not be physically able to process all the data. Scientists expect that new catalogs of millions of stars will be compiled based on the information collected, which will allow them to better understand their evolution through the example of many new observations.

^{Galaxy NGC 1300}

^{Galaxy NGC 1087}

^{Galaxy NGC 2835}

^{Galaxy NGC 1512}

^{Galaxy NGC 4254}