NASA drops treasure trove of epic images snapped by world's most powerful space telescope

NASA has released a collection of images snapped by the incredibly impressive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the world's most powerful space telescope that cost more than $10 billion.

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From its distant vantage point in space, NASA's Webb has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on a selection of spiral galaxies, revealing them in unprecedented detail for the world to see. The above image is a mosaic of all of the spiral galaxies Webb has imaged, and while many of these galaxies, if not all of them, have been previously studied by astronomers, many are still enthralled by the level of detail Webb can achieve as the observatory's images show parts of the spiral galaxies that have never been seen before.

One of the sought-after aspects of these images is the capture of millions of newborn stars, which populate the spiral arms of these galaxies.

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"Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured millions of stars in these images, which sparkle in blue tones. Some stars are spread throughout the spiral arms, but others are clumped tightly together in star clusters," writes NASA

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The telescope's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) data highlights glowing dust, showing us where it exists around and between stars. It also spotlights stars that haven't yet fully formed - they are still encased in the gas and dust that feed their growth, like bright red seeds at the tips of dusty peaks.

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Webb's images show large, spherical holes within the spiral arms of the galaxy, which, according to astronomers, is evidence of a past supernova.

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"These holes may have been created by one or more stars that exploded, carving out giant holes in the interstellar material," explained Adam Leroy, a professor of astronomy at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

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