A new photo taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed the hidden gaseous “bone” structure of a distant galaxy — and it’s absolutely spectacular.
The cosmic knot of gas, dust and stars belongs to the spiral galaxy IC 5332, located in the constellation Sculptor more than 29 million light-years from Earth. As it sits nearly perfectly face-on with respect to Earth, its spiral arms can be seen incredibly clearly.
This isn’t the first time IC 5332 has had its photo snapped. The 66,000 light-year-wide galaxy — roughly two-thirds the size of our Milky Way — was also imaged in the past by the Hubble Space Telescope. But Hubble can’t see in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, whereas the James Webb Space Telescope can. As a result, the updated image contains so many previously obscured details that it looks almost completely different.
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