The James Webb Space Telescope sent an image of the dwarf galaxy WLM [space news]

The James Webb Space Telescope sent an image of the dwarf galaxy WLM. It is quite close to the Milky Way, about 3 million light-years from Earth, but relatively isolated. Astronomers believe that the WLM galaxy has not interacted with other systems and that the gas contained in the WLM galaxy is similar to the gas that made up the galaxies in the early universe.

All of this makes this galaxy very interesting because it can be used to study how stars form and evolve in small galaxies similar to those that existed in the early universe.

The image shows a huge number of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; gas clouds within the galaxy; foreground stars with diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with clearly visible features, such as tidal tails.

The main scientific goal of astronomers is to reconstruct the history of star formation in this galaxy. Low-mass stars can live for billions of years, which means that some of the stars we see today in the WLM were formed in the early Universe. By determining the properties of these low-mass stars, scientists can gain insight into what happened in the distant past.

Scientists have previously studied this region with other telescopes. Here, for example, is a picture of the Spitzer telescope compared with the James Webb telescope image. And this is an image of the galaxy from the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Scientists will use data from James Webb to supplement the information they already have and learn more about the evolution of galaxies in the Universe.

[guyh]

That VLT image is stunning as well!
Wow.