2023-10-10 19:05:24
NASA put online every day at the beginning of October a sumptuous image of a galaxy taken with the Hubble telescope. Futura presents two to start with: the barred spiral galaxies NGC 685 and NGC 5068, the latter having also been recently observed with the James-Webb space telescope, the JWST.
It’s almost as if we’re only talking about the James Webb Space Telescope, but the venerable Hubble Telescope is still active and its legacy is very much alive, helping to bring to fruition the content of new images from the JWST as it spins. his gaze towards objects already studied with Hubble. This month of October, NASA therefore took the opportunity to recall that with more than 33 years of orbit and 1.5 million observations, Hubble data still offers a wealth of information on the objects of our Universe or quite simply that they are always a source of wonder.
NASA has posted online an image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 685 as well as those taken by both Hubble and the JWST of NGC 5068, another barred spiral galaxy with thousands of star formation regions and large quantities of interstellar dust as explained in a press release.
Infrared and ultraviolet radiation discovered 200 years ago
The noosphere first became aware of NGC 5068 in 1785 when British astronomer William Herschel discovered it with his 12 meter focal length telescope (the largest at the time) in the southern region of the constellation Virgo. It is now known to be about 20 million light years from the Milky Way and has a diameter of about 45,000 light years.
William Herschel is not only known for the discovery of the planet Uranus, he is also known for the discovery in 1800 of the existence of infrared radiation which he called “radiative heat”. Herschel then used a glass prism to diffract the Sun’s light, placing three thermometers on a table onto which the solar spectrum was projected. He moved one of the thermometers to measure the rise in temperature associated with each color of the spectrum when he was surprised to notice that the temperature continued to increase even though the thermometer had already exceeded the visible spectrum on the side of the red color. .
Herschel would therefore not be surprised today if we told him that NGC 5068 can also be observed in the infrared and also in the ultraviolet since it was discovered in 1801 by his contemporary, the German physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter.
In fact, in June 2023, NASA released its own infrared image of NGC 5068 taken with JWST in an effort to learn more about star formation. Young, hot stars emit ultraviolet light and Hubble was already studying them in the ultraviolet in the case of NGC 5068.
Galaxies are the visible foundation of the Universe; each is a collection of stars, planets, gas, dust and dark matter held together by gravity. Hubble observations give us insight into how galaxies form, grow and evolve over time. To obtain a fairly accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. English subtitles should then appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Automatically translate”. Choose “French”. © NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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