Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 602, JWST

NGC 602, The stars are destroying the pillars. More specifically, some of the newly formed stars in the image center are emitting light so energetic that is evaporating the gas and dust in the surrounding pillars. Simultaneously, the pillars themselves are still trying to form new stars. The whole setting is the star cluster NGC 602, taken by the JWST in April 2023 and Hubble telescope in 2004. THis image is an overlay of the JWST image on the Hubble image with most of the detail from the JWST except for the very outer portions on the left side.  NGC 602 is located near the perimeter of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way galaxy. At the estimated distance of the SMC, the featured picture spans about 200 light-years. A tantalizing assortment of background galaxies are also visible — mostly around the edges — that are at least hundreds of millions of light-years beyond.

The local environment of this cluster is similar to the environment of the early Universe, with low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The existence of dark clouds of dense dust and the fact that the cluster is rich in ionised gas also suggest that star formation is taking place. Together with its associated nebula cloud N90, which contains clouds of ionized atomic hydrogen, this cluster provides a valuable opportunity to examine how stars can form under dramatically different conditions from those in the solar neighborhood.

The colors in the image are in false color taken with four filters with the red coming from a 11.3u MIRI filter and a  green from a MIRI 10u  filter, and blue from a 7.7u MIRI filter and a 3.35u Nircam filter.  This image was produced by Michael Adler from data on the MAST website. This image is quite different from the NASA version which consists of mostly Nircam near infrared data consisting of 8 filters and four filters from the mid IR MIRI camera. I found most of the NIRCAM data to have too many artifacts to process.

It is interesting to compare the Hubble(https://earthandskyimaging.com/product/small-magellanic-cloud-ngc-602-hubble/)and the JWST images. Some stars are much more visible in the Hubble image and the right side of the JWST image shows much more nebula cloud than in the Hubble image which is strange because you expect that the IR camera on the JWST would see through more of the nebula than the Hubble’s optical wavelengths.