Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, V. Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary's University).
Dr. Marcin Sawicki, along with a team of astronomers from Saint Mary’s and NASA, have released new research and images with NASA that reveal what our Milky Way galaxy might have looked like… 7 billion years ago.
The images captured are like a time machine, says Dr. Sawicki, explaining that using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers were able to compare other galaxies with our own Milky Way galaxy see what it could have looked like billions of years ago.
“These galaxies, seen billions of years ago when star formation was at its peak, are similar to the mass that the Milky Way galaxy would have been at that time. Webb is allowing us to study what the teenage years of our own galaxy could have been like,” said Sawicki.
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as well as JWST, Dr. Sawicki and postdoc researchers Dr. Vicente Estrada-Carpenter and Dr. Guillaume Desprez have released images that show a wavelength of light trapped in cosmic dust—with a uniquely intriguing shape. Read more.