The Cartwheel in space
EYE ON THE SKY
Our roundup of this month’s best images from the world’s best telescopes
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, 2 AUGUST 2022
The wonderful Webb Space Telescope delivers again, with this image of the Cartwheel Galaxy in the constellation Sculptor, and its companions, taken using both the scope’s near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras.
Formed by a galactic collision 400 million years ago, the Cartwheel Galaxy has a bright inner ring and colourful outer ring, both expanding outward from the centre. Before the collision shattered it into these beautiful rings, the Cartwheel was a spiral galaxy, and you can see the remains of its arms in the ‘spokes’ that connect the rings and give the galaxy its name. The red colouration comes from glowing dust rich in hydrocarbons, while the blue dots are pockets of star formation.
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Explore a gallery of these and more stunning space images www.skyatnightmagazine.com/bonus-content/IRIVOWL
A new star’s home
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, 8 AUGUST 2022
On the outskirts of the Orion Nebula, a swirl in the clouds attracted the Hubble Space Telescope’s attention. This luminous region, which surrounds newborn stars, is called a Herbig–Haro object, and its gas is perturbed by stellar winds from the young variable star IX Ori into two major outflows moving in opposite directions.
Beauty from destruction
CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY, SPITZER SPACE TELESCOPE, 25 JULY 2022
Zeta Ophiuchi’s companion star exploded as a supernova, leaving behind this ethereal sculpture made of gas heated to millions of degrees. The blue in the image is X-ray data gathered by the Chandra Observatory, while the red and green come from the retired Spitzer infrared space telescope.
And yet it moves
GAIA SPACECRAFT, 13 JUNE 2022
These full-sky images from ESA’s Gaia space observatory show (top) the speed at which 30 million Milky Way objects, mostly stars, move toward (bright) or away (dark) from Earth. The second image adds proper motion into the mix, with blue showing the parts of the sky where the average motion of stars is towards us and red is away from us.
Jupiter aglow
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, 22 AUGUST 2022
This is Jupiter and two of its moons as you’ve never seen them before, in an image processed by citizen scientists Judy Schmidt and Ricardo Hueso Alonso. Most striking are aurorae at the planet’s poles, as well as its faint rings and tiny moons Adrastea and Amalthea.
