WATCH: NASA releases new image of galaxies merging together

WASHINGTON, DC (KMID/KPEJ) – A glimpse of the universe. NASA released a new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on Friday.

The image was taken by the telescope as it collects information from its position 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.

NASA scientists think the image shows a key step in how galaxies merge and become very massive galaxies.

“Astronomers call it ‘the Penguin and the Egg’ and what you’re seeing are a very old galaxy, which is the egg to the left, and on the right you this incredibly distorted galaxy which was once a spiral galaxy, and these two are actually interacting with each other and the gravitational attraction is basically tearing that galaxy up and breaking the spirals and it’s basically at the same time pulling gas and stars out of what was a spiral galaxy and they are crashing into each other and creating waves of new star formation as these two galaxies merge,” explains Dr. Mark Clampin, NASA’s Director of Astrophysics.

The telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, from the Guiana Space Center, Kourou. It began scientific operations two years ago. It has been designed to look at infrared, which is heat radiation.

Webb is billed as something of a time machine as it uncovers the mysteries of how our universe began.

“I’m really excited about the very early universe, so we built Webb to look for the very first galaxies that formed in the universe. We’ve already found a galaxy that was present 300 million years after the Big Bang,” says Clampin.

“And as we start to study more of these with Webb, we found a lot of surprises, these galaxies are very massive, they’re very bright. And that raises the question: how did they get so big and so bright so quickly in the early universe. So as we do more and more observations with Webb, we will be able to answer that question, and that is really a key question in understanding how the universe was born and how it’s evolving.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to explore the universe for 5-10 years.

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