NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to dazzle, and its most recent image of dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM) is definitely no slouch. It’s located in our galactic neighborhood, approximately 3 million light-years from Earth, and the galaxy’s gas is similar to that of early galaxies that made up the universe.
The gas is fairly unenriched, which means it’s poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium due to galactic winds. Astronomers are focusing on reconstructing the star formation history of this galaxy because low-mass stars can live for billions of years, which means that some of the stars that we see in WLM today formed in the early universe. This allows the team to gain insight into what was happening in the very distant past.
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We can see a myriad of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting clouds of nebular gas within the galaxy; foreground stars with Webb’s diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with neat features like tidal tails. It’s really a gorgeous image,” said Kristen McQuinn of Rutgers University, one of the lead scientists on Webb Early Release Science (ERS) program..
