Though we all have differences, there’s one commonality that has prevailed for all of humanity: we are all floating on a rock, flying through outer space at over a million miles an hour.
Thanks to the rapid advancement of technology in the past century, we can observe much more of the universe than we ever thought possible.
The scale and sheer size of the universe make it impossible to truly learn everything, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Here's what's happening in space this week.
The latest image from the James Webb Space Telescope puts the spiral galaxy NGC 5068 on display as it has never been seen before. The portrait shows the barred spiral galaxy in exquisite detail, despite it being located 20 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson unveiled the image last week at an event in Warsaw, Poland.
The image shows the galaxy's 'delicate tracery and bright star clusters' in brilliant color. Similar to the Milky Way galaxy, NGC 5068 has a concentrated region of stars in its center.
The capture of NGC 5068 is part of an effort to create what NASA is calling an 'astronomical treasure trove,' an archive of star formation observations in nearby galaxies. Previous observations in the archive include images of the spiral galaxies IC5332 and M74.
A database of star formation observations will be highly valuable to astronomers, according to NASA. Learning more about the process of star formation in nearby galaxies allows astronomers to further their understanding of the formation of stars within the Milky Way, our own galaxy.
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