There's more to this galaxy than what meets the eye.

In visible light, thick lanes of dust hide much of nearby galaxy Centaurus A, but the James Webb Space Telescope observes in infrared light, showing a totally new view.

The image, released to mark four successful years of science from the world’s most powerful space telescope, reveals glowing clouds of dust, a central supermassive black hole, hidden star-forming regions, different generations of stars, and the lasting marks of an ancient galactic collision.

A new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals a remarkable cosmic sight: at least 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars. Just 5,300 light-years from Earth, the star duo are collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140. Each ring was created when the two stars came close together and their stellar winds (streams of gas they blow into space) collided so forcefully that some of the gas was compressed into dust. The stars' orbits bring them together about once every eight years, and forms a half-shell of dust that looks like a ring from our perspective. Like a cosmic fingerprint, the 17 rings reveal more than a century of stellar interactions—and the "fingerprint" belonging to Wolf-Rayet 140 may be equally unique. Other Wolf-Rayet stars produce dust, but no other pair are known to produce rings quite like Wolf-Rayet 140.

Learn more about Wolf-Rayet 140.

Spiral Galaxy NGC 2566 from Webb

This is the Spiral Galaxy NGC 2566.

The eight rays that appear to be emanating from the center are not real. They are diffraction spikes (lines radiating from bright light) caused by the structure of the Webb telescope.

The center of NGC 2566 is bright but not anything unusual, meaning it likely contains a supermassive black hole, but it's not currently very active.

At 76 million light years away, the lights we see from NGC 2566 today left when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The Galaxy is so close that Earth telescopes, like Webb and Hubble, can resolve the turbulent clouds of gas and dust where stars form.

NGC 2566 is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy.

(These shimmering cosmic curtains show interstellar gas and dust that has been heated by the flashbulb explosion of a long-ago supernova. The gas then glows infrared light in what is known as a thermal light echo. As the supernova illumination travels through space at the speed of light, the echo appears to expand. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed this light echo in the vicinity of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A three separate times, in essence creating a 3D scan of the interstellar material. Note that the field of view in the top row is rotated slightly clockwise relative to the middle and bottom rows, due to the roll angle of the Webb telescope when the observations were taken. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Jencson (Caltech/IPAC))

"We were pretty shocked to see this level of detail," said Jacob Jencson of Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, principal investigator of the science program.

"We see layers like an onion," added Josh Peek of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, a member of the science team. "We think every dense, dusty region that we see, and most of the ones we don't see, look like this on the inside. We just have never been able to look inside them before."

A collage of @nasa ‘s logo with different images captured by the Webb Space Telescope

Blue: https://esawebb.org/images/weic2518a/

White: https://esawebb.org/images/weic2611a/

Red: https://esawebb.org/images/potm2511a/