Nasa on Friday unveiled a set of images of two galaxies merging in sort of a “cosmic ballet“. The galaxies, affectionately named the Penguin and the Egg, are located 326 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra.
The release of these images marked the second anniversary of the telescope’s first scientific results.
The image was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope which was launched in 2021 and began collecting the data since that year.
Since becoming operational, Webb has observed galaxies teeming with stars that formed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang event that marked the beginning of the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.
“We see two galaxies, each a collection of billions of stars. The galaxies are in the process of merging. That’s a common way that galaxies like our own build up over time, to grow from small galaxies – like those that Webb has found shortly after the Big Bang – into mature galaxies like our own Milky Way,” Reuters quoted Jane Rigby, Nasa Webb senior project scientist, as saying.
Webb has made significant contributions to the understanding of the universe, detecting the earliest known galaxies and providing insights into exoplanet composition and star-forming regions.