Combining Webb’s infrared & Chandra's X-ray views demonstrat | ASTRONOMY
Combining Webb’s infrared & Chandra's X-ray views demonstrates the power of telescope teamwork.
Stephan's Quintet: 4 galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet are undergoing an intricate gravitational dance. (The 5th galaxy on the left is at a different distance!) Webb’s image (red, orange, yellow, green, blue) features never-seen-before details, like sweeping tails of gas and star formation bursts. Chandra (light blue) uncovers a shock wave that heats gas to tens of millions of degrees, as one galaxy passes through the others at around 2 million miles per hour. This image also includes infrared data from Spitzer (red, green, blue), now retired.
Cartwheel Galaxy: The Cartwheel Galaxy got its shape from a collision with a smaller galaxy (outside the field) about 100 million years ago. X-rays seen by Chandra (blue and purple) come from superheated gas, exploded stars, and neutron stars and black holes pulling material from companion stars. Webb’s infrared view (red, orange, yellow, green, blue) shows the Cartwheel Galaxy plus 2 smaller companions (not part of the collision) against a backdrop of many more distant galaxies.
Deep Field: Webb shows how galaxy cluster SMACS J0723, located ~4.2 billion light-years away, contains hundreds of galaxies. Galaxy clusters are filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas seen only in X-ray light. Chandra data (blue) reveals gas with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees, possessing a total mass about 100 trillion times that of the Sun. Invisible dark matter forms an even larger fraction of the cluster’s total mass.
Carina Nebula: Chandra’s data (pink) reveals over a dozen X-ray sources. These are mostly 1-2 million year old stars (very young for stars!) located in the outer region of a star cluster in the Carina Nebula. Young stars are much brighter in X-rays than old stars. The X-ray emission in the image’s top half likely comes from hot gas from the nebula’s 3 hottest, most massive stars, outside Webb’s view. Webb’s image uses: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR (Webb): NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; IR (Spitzer): NASA/JPL-Caltech
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