The James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared view has transformed our view of the large, barred spiral galaxy, revealing its skeleton of dust illuminated by the glow of young stars.
Visible light images of NGC 1559, such as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show a bright swirl of light, with clusters of bright, young stars scattered along spiral arms adorned with black dust lanes.
JWST has moved beyond the glitz; Its infrared vision reveals the interior of the galaxy. JWST’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) sees starlight filtered through obscuring dust as well as the glow of ionized hydrogen gas in star-forming regions. Meanwhile, the space telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) was able to capture clouds of tiny particulate matter produced by past generations by directly observing the dust. stars and tracing the spiral structure of NGC 1559.
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JWST’s new image of NGC 1559 is not only exquisite in its beauty. It was produced within the scope of the study and is also valuable from a scientific point of view. PHANGS (High Angular Resolution Physics in Nearby GalaxieS) is a project that aims to better understand how stars are born, how they live, and how they die in all kinds of galaxies in the universe. PHANGS is also interested in learning more about the interaction between these stars and the gas and dust clouds found in the galaxy and how they affect the overall, large-scale structure of the galaxy. The project, led by an international team of astronomers, is mapping these galaxies across the electromagnetic spectrum using not only JWST but also other powerful observatories. The list includes: Hubble space telescope, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Compact Array (ACA) in Chile, Very Large Array Radio telescopes (VLA) in the United States MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa and Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) in France.
But NGC 1559 stands out among the galaxies observed by PHANGS because it is located in a lonely region. space. It has no immediate galactic neighbors and is located in the southern hemisphere constellation Reticule. NGC 1559 also hosts four supernovae discovered in the last 40 years. The first three (SN 1984J, SN 1986L and SN 2005df) were discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Robert Evans. This was a time when amateurs conducting supernova patrols were finding the bulk of exploding stars, before professional automated telescopic surveys came online. An example of this is the fourth supernova seen in NGC 1559, aka SN 2009ib, discovered by the Chilean Automated Supernova Survey CHASE at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
The last two supernovae – SN 2005df and SN 2009ib – are particularly important because they allowed astronomers to calculate the distance to NGC 1559 and therefore the galaxy’s place on the cosmic distance ladder. This can help calculate the expansion rate of the universe.
SN 2009ib is a supernova known as a Type-II-P supernova. It represents the cataclysmic explosion of a massive star, but the light curve shows how the brightness of the supernova changes over time. time — remained flat or plateaued for 130 days after reaching peak brightness. The plateau is caused by hydrogen gas in the supernova debris becoming opaque as it is ionized by the supernova shock wave. Certain properties of these plateau supernovae allow the distance of each supernova (and thus the galaxy) from us to be measured. In 2009, astronomers led by Katalin Takáts of Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile used SN 2009ib to calculate the distance to NGC 1559, obtaining an answer of 19.8 megapixels.parsecor 64.57 million light years.
Meanwhile, SN 2005df is a type 1a supernova signals extinction white dwarf. Type 1a supernovae have standardizable luminosities. The further away they are, the dimmer they appear, but if we know what their reality is, they can be standardized. brightness So we can figure out exactly how far away they have to be to appear so faint. Therefore, they can be used to detect cosmic distances. For this reason, they are also considered “standard candles”. In 2019, astronomers led by Caroline Huang and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University used SN 2005df along with two other types of standard candles, Cepheid and Mira-type variable stars, to confirm the distance to NGC 1559. A response of 19.8 megaparsecs is in excellent agreement with the previous measurement in SN 2009ib.
Based in part on this distance measurement, Huang and Riess’s team was able to calibrate the brightness of Type 1a supernovae in more distant galaxies to measure their distance more accurately. They then compared these distances to themselves. redshift to calculate Hubble constanta measure expansion of the universeThat would be 73.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec.
This calculation is interesting; “added further fuel to the cosmological paradox known as”Hubble voltageExpansion rate measurements using type 1a supernovae provide a different answer to study-based expansion rate measurements. cosmic microwave backgroundInstead, a Hubble constant of 67.8 kilometers per second per megaparsec is obtained.
Why these measurements are different when they should be the same in every respect remains a mystery.
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NGC 1559 has another notable feature. In 2023, Taiwanese astronomers used the following data: NASA‘S Chandra X-ray Observatory to find eight ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULX) in NGC 1559. ULXs are mysterious objects that release showers of extremely high-energy X-rays in amounts far greater than can be explained by any known process in stars. The suspicion is that these phenomena involve compact objects such as: neutron stars And black holes.
Of the eight ULXs in NGC 1559, one stood out above the rest. The X-ray emission, called X-24, varies with a periodicity of 7,500 seconds (two hours and five minutes). This periodicity is suspected to be related to the orbital period of an object, possibly a star, that moves around a stellar-mass black hole with a gravitational force strong enough to tear material from the orbiting object and consume it. If so, the first compact binary discovered would be ULX.
For a loosely wound but highly spiral galaxy located in the middle of nowhere with few other galaxies nearby, NGC 1559 manages to hold an important place for astronomers in the study of stars, galaxies, and the universe in general.