According to the official website of the European Space Agency (ESA), a set of latest high-definition images taken by the Webb Space Telescope were released recently.It displays 19 spiral galaxies closer to the Milky Way, providing new clues to star formation as well as galaxy structure and evolution.It is understood that the new observations, from Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), show about 100,000 star clusters and millions of stars.
To the astronomers' surprise, the images also showed large spherical shells in gas and dust that may have been created by exploding stars.
Thomas Williams, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, said the data are important,Because they give us new insights into the earliest stages of star formation.
Public information shows thatThe Webb Space Telescope cost $10 billion and is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever built by NASA.
Its main mirror is 6.5 meters in diameter and consists of 18 huge hexagonal lenses; it is equipped with 5 layers of deployable sun visors.
The Webb Space Telescope was launched from the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana on December 25, 2021. One month later, it entered an orbit around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, about 1.5 million kilometers away from the Earth.