Last week’s debut of the first science photos taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were just a taste of what’s to come. Case in point: a gorgeous, vexing new photo of spiral galaxy NGC 628. The photo is a composite of three sets of observations taken at different wavelengths in infrared. Though NGC 628 has been observed by telescopes in the past (including the aging Hubble Space Telescope), Webb’s ability to see in infrared makes for an exquisite view of the galaxy’s internal vortex structure. That includes the image’s dense purple hue—apparently the result of NGC 628’s dust clouds that are composed mainly of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, University of Nottingham astronomer Michael Merrifield told New Scientist. The photo was first posted to Twitter by University of Copenhagen astronomer Gabriel Brammer, who was not part of the team that snapped the photo but downloaded the publicly available data and set up the composite.
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