A new star is born from two colliding galaxies, James Webb made another wonderful observation.
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The James Webb Space Telescope has imaged a collision between two galaxies causing waves of star formation invisible to other telescopes.
The wave of star formation was caused by the encounter of two galaxies collectively known as IC 1623. Scientists say the merging pair is producing stars at a rate 20 times faster than our own Milky Way galaxy.
Colliding galaxies have been imaged before by other telescopes, including the Web’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope was specialized in detecting optical light (the type of wavelengths visible to the human eye). But IC 1623 is shrouded in a thick dust shield, preventing astronomers from peering deep into the galaxy to see stars forming. The James Webb Space Telescope, with its dust-penetrating infrared view, easily penetrated the envelope and revealed a luminous center that emitted so much infrared (essentially heat) that the galaxy was Webb’s Generates the typical 8-point diffraction pattern commonly seen in images. bright star.
Compared to early Hubble images of IC 1623, Webb’s view reveals entirely new layers of structure in the merging galaxies, shown as the central blob of bright red and orange material in the image. .
His two galaxies in this image are in the Cetacean constellation about 270 million light-years away from Earth. Astronomers believe the merger could also produce a supermassive black hole, but it’s not shown in this image.
This image is from a combination of data from Webb’s three of his four instruments, his MIRI camera and his NIRCam camera, and his NIRSpec spectrometer at the European Space Agency. created. 25), stated in a statement.
A study (opens in new tab) explaining this observation was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.
https://www.space.com/james-webb-telescope-star-formation-galactic-crash-photo
