i'd really love it if someone could maybe explain what we are seeing here.
firstly regarding the colour a) i assume this is false colour, but the telescope is optical so maybe not, anyone know what happened between the images being collected and being presented to us? there must be something if the infrared portion is incorporated in the images. b) i assume the blue and red are doppler shifts in opposite directions, so is the big cartwheel thing actually all one mass or two things on top of each other? c) how did this form.
any amateur astrophysicists or people that enjoy speculating (please keep within the realms of possibility, this is S&T after all...) i'd really love some input.
has there been any publications about any of the observations yet?
It is not false color per se, they are just adjusted to the visible spectrum, or we'd be looking at nothing.
The JWST uses reference data from it's different cams that work in different infrared spectrums
here an easy illustration
what they do to make these pictures contain any data for us is move it from the infrared spectrum to the visible spectrum,
but keep the dimensions the same, making the data usuable.
The picture you're looking at is a composite image from two cams NIRcam(near infrared) and MIRIcam (mid infrared), first of all
what you're looking at is a galaxy which has been rammed right in its center, several hundred million years ago, by a smaller galaxy,
and in reaction has formed this outer ring, which has turned into a birthing chamber powerhouse for stars,
it's the remnant of the smaller galaxy which has been absolutely obliterated by the larger one, and created this violent outburst of star-birth
it's super nova upon super nova making more and more stars, as star death, if the star was big enough = star birth
before the collision it must have looked very similar to Andromeda or the Milky way.
In the center you can see the dust is much more evenly distributed, speaking for the fact that it's much older than the outer ring that has formed after the collision,
and of course for the fact that there are much older stars inside the inner ring, among newer ones, while the outer ring should almost entirely be baby stars and super novas.
The reason why it looks so stylish is the freakish amount of hot dust twirling inside, which ofc was also created by the collision,
and the subsequent collision of at least several billion stars.
Pretty cool, huh?
edit: there are dozens and dozens upon publications about JWST findings,
I listen to them all day at work(well.."vacation" from my first job for 16 hour work-days..), presented by my favourite astrophysics professor (sadly a German, sorry)
but in English there are even more publications, so it would be easy to find something
edit no 2: the whole thing isn't too rare, although they were once considered the rarest galaxies in the universe.
Ring galaxies like this one have been found often by Hubble, like this beauty, which actually has two
Carrying the beautiful name NGC 1512
or Hoags object found in the 50s
Galaxies collide or should I say collided all the time in the spacetime we can observe.
It's one of the not too many scenarios of how new stars can form.
www.nasa.gov
