2024-07-18 04:15:50
The James Webb Space Telescope has been providing impressive images for two years. To mark the anniversary, NASA is showing images of a special pair of galaxies.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been in operation for almost two and a half years, and delivered its first images two years ago. Since then, impressive images from the powerful telescope have been published time and again.
To mark the two-year anniversary of the first publications, NASA has now released some more images from the JWST (short for “James Webb Space Telescope”). They show, among other things, two galaxies – a large spiral galaxy and, to the left of it, a compact elliptical galaxy.
It doesn’t take much imagination to recognize the animal that gave the object its name in the large spiral galaxy – a penguin. The small galaxy next to the penguin is aptly called “the egg”. Together, the pair of galaxies is called “Arp 142” and is about 326 million light years away from Earth.
The pair met for the first time around 25 to 75 million years ago and immediately set off a “fireworks display,” as the article on the Webb telescope’s website puts it. This “fireworks display” primarily involved the formation of new stars in the “Penguin.” And this continues to this day. Around 100 to 200 stars are still formed in the Penguin every year. By comparison, in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, there are around six to seven new stars per year.
What is special about the pair of galaxies is that the two “partners” interact with each other. The “penguin” has changed its appearance over the years due to the gravitational interaction with the “egg”. Spiral arms have been formed, for example, and particles of gas and dust have been pulled away from the galaxy in such a way that they are distributed in all possible directions like confetti.
Even though the “penguin” looks much larger than the “egg”, both have almost the same mass. The “egg” only appears smaller because it contains only gas and dust, as well as old stars. The almost identical mass is also the reason why the galaxies have not yet merged, which is often the case with paired galaxies with different masses.