Cartwheel Galaxy (MIRI)


This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) shows a group of galaxies, including a large distorted ring-shaped galaxy known as the Cartwheel. The Cartwheel Galaxy, located 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is composed of a bright inner ring and an active outer ring. While this outer ring has a lot of star formation, the dusty area in between reveals many stars and star clusters.

The mid-infrared light captured by MIRI reveals fine details about these dusty regions and young stars within the Cartwheel Galaxy, which are rich in hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds, as well as silica dust, like much of the dust on Earth.

Young stars, many of which are present in the bottom right of the outer ring, energise surrounding hydrocarbon dust, causing it to glow orange. On the other hand, the clearly defined dust between the core and the outer ring, which forms the “spokes” that inspire the galaxy’s name, is mostly silica dust. This dust feeds the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy.

MIRI also produces information regarding the distances of galaxies in the background, with the closest galaxies in blue and the farthest in green and red. The different colours are due to bright emission from dust being redshifted by the expansion of the universe.

The two smaller spiral galaxies to the left of Cartwheel display much of the same behaviour, with the top left galaxy showing a large amount of star formation, and the galaxy underneath showing the light from another supermassive black hole.

MIRI was contributed by ESA and NASA, with the instrument designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (the MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

More image download options via https://esawebb.org/news/weic2211/