'Cosmic ballet': Webb telescope captures slow merger of 2 galaxies

Nasa released on July 12 a pair of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showing two galaxies – one nicknamed the Penguin and the other the Egg – in the process of merging in sort of a cosmic ballet as the US space agency marked two years since it unveiled the orbiting observatory’s first scientific results.

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The Webb telescope, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data the following year, has reshaped understanding of the early universe while taking stunning pictures of the cosmos.

The two galaxies in the images are situated 326 million light years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.5 trillion km.

“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,” said Dr Jane Rigby, Nasa’s Webb senior project scientist.

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.