Webb Space Telescope captures new image of Tarantula Nebula, also captures image of Einstein’s Ring

The Webb Space Telescope‘s high-resolution infrared instruments have come together to reveal thousands of young stars that humans have never seen. New details captured by the Webb Space Telescope also revealed gas, dust and distant background galaxies in the Tarantula Nebula.

This image is also the latest picture of the universe taken by the Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, which launched on Christmas Day 2021, took its first images in July. There’s also a perfectly shaped “Einstein Ring” in this recent photo of the Tarantula Nebula.

The Tarantula Nebula is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 161,000 light-years away from Earth. It has the brightest star-forming region in the galaxy closest to the Milky Way, and it and our galaxy are called the Local Group of galaxies. The Tarantula Nebula is of particular interest to astronomers who study the process of star formation. The nebula’s chemical composition is similar to the star-forming regions in the universe when the universe was only a few billion years old, so studying the nebula could provide scientists with unique insights into how stars formed in the early universe.

The Webb Space Telescope project is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency