James Webb Telescope Photos: NASA Captures Stunning View of Two Possible Galaxies Merging

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was able to capture a stunning view of never-before-seen details of two galaxies merging with each other.

The telescope was specially designed to detect the faint infrared light from very far galaxies and provide astronomers with a glimpse at the early stages of the universe. How galaxies behaved during this time of our universe is very much a mystery and experts have very little understanding of it.

Merging Galaxies

However, with the assistance of gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies in the foreground, faint background galaxies can be magnified and also show up multiple times in different parts of the image.

Three astronomers working on Webb; Dan Coe of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency and the Johns Hopkins University, Tiger Hsiao of the Johns Hopkins University, and Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin, have shared their findings.

The scientists, who have been observing the distant galaxy known as MACS0647-JD using Webb have found something quite interesting. Coe noted that he discovered the galaxy a decade ago using the Hubble Space Telescope, as per NASA.

He added that at the time, he never worked on high redshift galaxies but later found one that the potentially the most distant at redshift 11, which was roughly 97% of the way back to the big bang. Using Hubble, it was just shown as a pale, red dot.

Doe said that by observing it, astronomers believed it was a really small, tiny galaxy in the first 400 million years of the universe. But using Webb now, experts are able to resolve two objects and they are actively discussing whether they are two galaxies or two clumps of stars within a galaxy.

According to CNET, Andrey Vayner, a co-author of a study that discovered the brilliant view of a galaxy cluster merging around a massive black hole, said that something dramatic was happening in these systems.

Breathtaking Images

One fascinating thing about the image that the team revealed was that the quasar at hand is considered an "extremely red" quasar. This means that it is very far away from our planet and is therefore physically rooted in a primitive region of the universe that falls near the beginning of its time.

Scientists believe that the quasar's light took roughly 11.5 billion years to reach Earth, making it one of the most powerful of its kind to be observed from such a massive distance. Vayner said that the galaxy is at this perfect moment in its life where it is about to transform and would look vastly different in a few billion years.

A co-principal investigator of the study, Nadia L. Zakamska said that previous images hinted that the galaxy was potentially interacting with other galaxies on the path to a merger. This is due to their shapes getting distorted in the process. The team thought that maybe that was what they saw when they observed the system.

But the group leader, Dominika Wylezalek, who is from the University of Heidelberg, said that after getting data from Webb, she had no idea what she was even looking at. She added that the team then spent weeks just looking and staring at the images, Johns Hopkins University reported.

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Nasa, Galaxies