The Webb Space Telescope captures Stephan's Quintet in a mosaic of nearly 1,000 images

by Jeremy Gray

posted Friday, July 15, 2022 at 15:00 EDT

Yesterday, we saw Webb’s incredible photos of the Southern Ring Nebula. On Wednesday, the focus was Webb’s first deep-plane image of SMACS 0723, the sharpest and deepest image of the universe captured so far. Now it’s time to take a look at Stephan’s Quintet, as imaged by the Webb Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Central Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

The Quintet Stephan image is a large mosaic of nearly 1,000 images. This is Webb’s big image to date and contains over 150 million pixels. You can download the full 150MB .TIFF file here. All of these details allowed researchers to investigate how interactions between galaxies drove the evolution of galaxies in the early universe.

Stephan’s Quintet (NIRCam and MIRI composite image).

“With its powerful infrared vision and extremely high spatial resolution, Webb demonstrates never-before-seen detail in this galaxy cluster. Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and stellar-birth-exploding regions adorn the image and stars are drawn from several galaxies. due to gravitational interactions. Most dramatically, Webb caught a very large shock wave when one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, crashed into the cluster.”

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Click here to view the full resolution image.

The “quintet” in Stephan’s Quintet are five galaxies. They are also known as Hickson Compact Group 92 (HGC 92). The Stephan Quintet was discovered in 1877 by French astronomer douard Stephan in 1877, and is located in the constellation Pegasus.

Although there are five galaxies, only four of them are “stuck in the cosmic dance”. Although the five galaxies appear close to each other, the fifth, and far left, NGC 7320, is quite far (but still somewhat cosmically close) from the other four galaxies. NGC 7320 is about 40 million light-years from Earth, while the other galaxies, NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319, are about 290 million light-years away.

Stephan’s Quintet is an amazing “laboratory” for studying how galaxy mergers and interactions affect the evolution of galaxies. “Scientists rarely see in such detail how interacting galaxies trigger each other’s star formation and how the gas in these galaxies is disturbed. Stephan’s Quintet is a fantastic ‘laboratory’ for studying the processes fundamental to all of these galaxies.” wrote NASA.

Tight groupings of galaxies may have been more common during the early universe because falling and extremely hot matter “may have fueled very energetic black holes called quasars.” The uppermost galaxy in Stephan’s Quintet, NGC 7319, includes an active galactic core, which is a supermassive black hole about 24 million times the mass of the Sun. Supermassive black holes attract material and produce light energy equivalent to about 40 billion Suns. Talk about strong.

The Webb Space Telescope Team also shared an image of Stephan’s Quintet as imaged by NIRCam only. It’s a slightly different look; You can see a significant difference when you look at the dust and other gaseous matter around the galaxy.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Click here to view the full resolution image.

Webb took a closer look at the active galactic core using the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). This instrument includes an integral field unit (IFU), which includes a camera and a spectrograph. The instrument provided Webb’s team with a “data cube”, “a collection of images of the galactic core spectral features.” NASA writes, “Just like medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), IFU allows scientists to ‘slice and cut’ information into multiple images for detailed study. Webb penetrates the dust envelope surrounding the nucleus to reveal hot gas near the active black hole. and measuring the velocity of the bright outflow. The telescope sees this outflow driven by the black hole in a level of detail never seen before.

It’s also important to put Stephan’s Quintet’s new image into context. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this beautiful image of Stephan’s Quintet in 2009. You can view the image below and read more about it by clicking here.

There is no doubt that Webb provides a significant increase in resolution compared to Hubble. NASA writes, “Combined with the most detailed infrared images from Stephan’s Quintet from MIRI and the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the data from Webb will provide a wealth of valuable new information. For example, it will help scientists understand the rate at which supermassive black holes give off eat and grow. Webb also saw star-forming regions much more directly, and was able to examine emissions from dust – a level of detail that was not possible until now.”

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