Webb, with its ability to detect infrared light, now uncovers new insights into the nature of the Cartwheel.ĭownload the full-resolution, uncompressed version and supporting visuals from the Space Telescope Science Institute But the dramatic galaxy has been shrouded in mystery – perhaps literally, given the amount of dust that obscures the view. Other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have previously examined the Cartwheel. SIGN UP FOR SPACE COAST DAILY NEWS TEXT ALERTS HERE: As this ring expands, it plows into surrounding gas and triggers star formation. On the other hand, the outer ring, which has expanded for about 440 million years, is dominated by star formation and supernovas. The bright core contains a tremendous amount of hot dust with the brightest areas being the home to gigantic young star clusters. Because of these distinctive features, astronomers call this a “ring galaxy,” a structure less common than spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. These two rings expand outwards from the center of the collision, like ripples in a pond after a stone is tossed into it. The Cartwheel Galaxy sports two rings - a bright inner ring and a surrounding, colorful ring. The collision most notably affected the galaxy’s shape and structure. Collisions of galactic proportions cause a cascade of different, smaller events between the galaxies involved the Cartwheel is no exception.

Its appearance, much like that of the wheel of a wagon, is the result of an intense event – a high-speed collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy not visible in this image. The Cartwheel Galaxy, located about 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is a rare sight.

This image provides a new view of how the Cartwheel Galaxy has changed over billions of years. This finding is inconsistent with a monolithic model of association formation and instead favours a hierarchical model, in which OB associations form in situ, following the fractal structure of the gas from which they form.Webb’s powerful infrared gaze produced this detailed image of the Cartwheel and two smaller companion galaxies against a backdrop of many other galaxies. Therefore, the large-scale structure of associations is not set by the expansion of clusters, rather it is a relic of the molecular gas cloud from which the association was formed. While most present-day OB associations do exhibit low levels of expansion, there is no significant correlation between radial velocity and radius. We find that the observed kinematic properties of associations are consistent with highly substructured velocity fields and additionally require some degree of localized expansion from subclusters within the association. We utilize the second Gaia data release to quantify the degree to which OB associations are undergoing expansion and, therefore, whether OB associations are the product of expanding clusters, or whether they were born in situ, as the large-scale globally unbound associations that we see today. Instead they are formed in situ as the low-density side of this distribution, rather than as the remnants of expanding clusters. However, this paradigm is inconsistent with recent results, both theoretical and observational, that instead favour a hierarchical picture of star formation in which stars are formed across a continuous distribution of gas densities and most OB associations never were bound clusters. In this scenario, present-day gravitationally unbound OB associations are the result of the expansion of initially gravitationally bound star clusters. Historically, it has often been asserted that most stars form in compact clusters.

Nasa picture of the day star clusters