On the back end of a telescope, looks can be deceiving.
Two decades ago, astronomers spied something strange with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope that they dubbed the "cosmic tornado" because of its corkscrew shape. Even more baffling was the fuzzy object at its tip.
The tornado is a so-called "Herbig-Haro object," formed when a newborn star tosses jets of material into interstellar space and creates a grand illumination. Scientists considered the fuzzy thing could be a nearby star.
But the James Webb Space Telescope, an observatory that can produce images with far higher resolution than the now-retired Spitzer, has revealed the unexpected truth about the fuzzy object — an answer that may just remind some folks of a certain bobble dangling from a cat collar in the original Men in Black film.
It's not a star. It's an entire freaking galaxy.
The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates the Webb and Hubble telescopes for NASA, said it turns out the objects aren't related at all but happen to be in the same line of sight.
"When peering out into space, we get a 2D view of a 3D universe," the institute said in a news release. "Sometimes, images will capture objects that appear close to each other in the sky, but are actually at wildly different distances and are unassociated with each other."
Back in the day, astronomers had considered that the two objects were unrelated and that their closeness was an illusion. But they also pondered whether the faint glow could be the result of fast-moving gas and dust from the tornado, officially named Herbig-Haro 49/50, crashing into material surrounding a star. Herbig-Haro outflows can span many light-years.
Webb's penetrating infrared gaze has now revealed the true identity of the glow as a face-on, distant spiral galaxy. It has a protruding central bulge, shown in blue, where older stars reside.
The bulge also seems to have side lobes, suggesting that this could be a barred spiral galaxy like the Milky Way.
The above video provides a fly-through visualization of the James Webb Space Telescope's view of Herbig-Haro 49/50.
Bars — ribbons of stars and gas that cut across the core of a galaxy — form in spiral galaxies when the orbits of stars near the galaxy's center become erratic and stretched out. As the stars' orbits get larger, they start to fall in line, so to speak. Bars grow as gravity collects more nearby stars. Eventually, a large percentage of the stars within such a galaxy's nucleus get caught up in the bar.
Reddish clumps inside the galaxy's spiral arms show where it harbors warm dust and clusters of forming stars. The galaxy even displays empty bubbles in these dusty regions, which exploded stars may have carved out, similar to nearby galaxies observed by Webb in the so-called PHANGS program.
As for the Harbig-Haro object, scientists believe its edge will eventually move outward and seem to cover up the galaxy, though that will take thousands of years to occur. The object is about 625 light-years from Earth in the constellation Chamaeleon.
Webb's new composite infrared image of the jet revealed glowing hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules in orange and red. Scientists thought the arc patterns, sort of like a boat wake, would lead back to a young forming star, Cederblad 110 IRS4. But not all of the arcs point in that direction after all. Another jet could be intersecting with Herbig-Haro 49/50 or the main jet might be breaking apart.
Astronomers hope the Webb observations will help them better understand how jets associated with young developing stars can affect their surroundings.
