JWST Turns Its Gaze on the Cartwheel Galaxy - by spacewriter
The obvious wreckage from the collision consists of two glowing rings, an inner and an outer one. The inner ring hosts a bright nucleus that’s home to a supermassive black hole. That’s surrounded by a smaller ring of gas and hot dust. Then there’s the outer ring. It has actually expanded so much since the collision that it’s bigger than our Milky Way Galaxy.
The mid-infrared light captured by MIRI reveals chemical details about dusty regions in the Cartwheel and young stars it contains. Young stars, many of which are present in the bottom right of the outer ring, energize surrounding hydrocarbon dust, causing it to glow orange. On the other hand, the clearly defined dust between the core and the outer ring forms the “spokes” that inspire the galaxy’s name. This dust feeds the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.
When astronomers put together all the imaging data from JWST, they see this scene is just a snapshot in time. The Cartwheel is changing, expanding, and reforming itself. What will happen to it as it changes? The cartwheel-like structure will likely disintegrate as the gas and dust fall back in toward the center. If the other companion galaxies don’t interfere, then perhaps a few hundred million years from now, the Cartwheel will be a beautiful spiral once more.
In 2006, NASA unveiled a multi-wavelength image of the Cartwheel Group. It was created using data from Hubble Space Telescope, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer , the Spitzer Space Telescope , and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. In particular, the Chandra data revealed a number of bright x-ray sources in the Cartwheel that likely indicate the presence of stellar black holes. That’s not surprising in a region that is alive with the formation of massive stars that die quickly as supernovae.
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