X-rays add a new layer to space telescope images

When James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent its first images this summer, many of us were blown away by the clarity and beauty of the photos. But even space telescopes work best with little maintenance, and JWST is designed to work with many other telescopes and equipment. Four of JWST’s first images are now getting a slight X-ray vision shakeup thanks to NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory. These re-blends of the original JWST images are composites, meaning they are layered to include data from multiple telescopes. The stellar snapshots show how much more powerful the telescopes are when they work together and reveal some features that were not visible to JWST alone. according to NASA.

Stefan’s Quintet

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

Four galaxies inside Stefan’s Quintet (about 620,000 light-years across) perform a complex dance with gravity. The fifth galaxy is just an observer watching from a distance. Images of the quintet taken by JWST (which have red, orange, yellow, green and blue colors) show never-before-seen features and details of “the results of these interactions, including billowing tails of gas and bursts of star formation,” according to NASA. Chandra data (in light blue) of this same system show a shock wave heating the gas to tens of millions of degrees as one of the galaxies passes through it at about 2 million miles per hour. Infrared data from the now retired NASA Spitzer Space Telescope (shown in red, green and blue) as included.

Galaxy Wheel

The acrobatic Cartwheel galaxy was shaped this way due to a collision with another smaller galaxy about 100 million years ago. Star formation in its outer ring and elsewhere in the galaxy is triggered when the smaller galaxy hits the Wheel. Chandra’s X-rays, shown in blue and purple, are due to “superheated gas, individual exploded stars and neutron stars, and black holes pulling material from companion stars,” NASA said in a statement. JWST offers infrared views in red, orange, yellow, green and blue, showing the Cartwheel galaxy and two smaller satellite galaxies that were not involved in the 100 million year old collision.

SMACS 0723.3–7327

Located about 4.2 billion light-years from Earth, the JWST data show that the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723 actually contains hundreds of individual galaxies. These galaxy clusters are more than their galaxies—they are some of the largest structures in the universe. These clusters are “filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas visible only in X-ray light,” according to NASA. The Chandra data (shown in blue) show really hot gas. This gas is approximately tens of millions of degrees and has a total mass about 100 trillion times that of our sun, several times the mass of all the galaxies in the cluster. Most of the mass in this cluster consists of separate dark matter.

[Related: This kilonova could have created the first-ever extragalactic ‘sonic boom.’]

NGC 3324, the Space Rocks of the Carina Nebula

Rocks aren’t just for climbing back to Earth. Chandra data for “Space Rocks” (shown in pink) c Carina Nebula reveals over a dozen separate X-ray sources. These stars in the outer region of the nebula are between 1 and 2 million years old, quite young in stellar terms. Typically, young stars are much brighter in X-rays than older stars, so X-ray studies are “an ideal way to distinguish the stars in the Carina Nebula from the many stars of different ages in our Milky Way galaxy in our line of sight to the nebula, ” NASA said. The JWST data uses red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue in this image as well.