As we inch closer to Christmas, NASA is celebrating with a galaxy it says looks like a Christmas wreath. Wednesday, the space agency shared a picture taken with the Webb Space Telescope of a galaxy named NGC 7469. A spiral galaxy, the orange and blue hues combined with its cosmic dust, combined with a bright galactic nucleus, the galaxy admittedly does look like nice little cosmic Christmas decoration.
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Located in the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7469 is some 220 million light-years from Earth and is one of the celestial bodies being studied as part of the Great Observatories All-sky LIRGs Survey.
“NGC 7469 is home to an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which is an extremely bright central region that is dominated by the light emitted by dust and gas as it falls into the galaxy’s central black hole. This galaxy provides astronomers with the unique opportunity to study the relationship between AGNs and starburst activity because this particular object hosts an AGN that is surrounded by a starburst ring at a distance of a mere 1500 light-years,” the ESA’s Webb picture database explains.
While NGC 7469 has long been a subject of study for scientists, it’s been tricky to peer through the cosmic dust blocking the galaxy. That’s now possible with the infrared-capable Webb Space Telescope.
“Using Webb’s MIRI, NIRCam and NIRspec instruments to obtain images and spectra of NGC 7469 in unprecedented detail, the GOALS team has uncovered a number of details about the object,” the ESA adds. “This includes very young star-forming clusters never seen before, as well as pockets of very warm, turbulent molecular gas, and direct evidence for the destruction of small dust grains within a few hundred light-years of the nucleus — proving that the AGN is impacting the surrounding interstellar medium. Furthermore, highly ionised, diffuse atomic gas seems to be exiting the nucleus at roughly 6.4 million kilometres per hour — part of a galactic outflow that had previously been identified, but is now revealed in stunning detail with Webb.”
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