James Webb Telescope releases new image of two galaxies ‘dancing’

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — The newest image from the James Webb Space Telescope was released Friday on the two-year anniversary of observations.

The image shows two galaxies called the Penguin and the Egg seemingly entwined in a dance.

“What’s actually happening is two galaxies are interacting,” said Dr. Jane Rigby, the senior scientist for the Webb Telescope. “One is a spiral like our own Milky Way and one is a more compact galaxy. They’re doing this dance in which they’re eventually going to merge and become one galaxy.”

Since the Webb Telescope launched over two years ago, Rigby says it has changed the way we see and learn about the universe.

“It’s just such a leap forward from where we were to what we have with Webb,” she said. “Webb can see things in that are about 100 times fainter than what we could see before. It’s made observations that would have taken about a year in a couple hours.”

Light from the deepest reaches of space can take millions of years to reach us, but the James Webb Telescope can see infrared light. This allows the telescope to observe what we can’t with human sight, opening our eyes to parts of the universe we never thought we could see.

“The farther away we look, the farther back in time we’re able to see,” Rigby said. “The Webb Telescope is so sensitive that we can see back almost to the beginning, to within a couple 100 million years of when it all got started after The Big Bang.”

“The stuff we’re made of was made in the hearts of stars,” she said. “We’re learning that story with the data from the Webb Telescope.”

To learn more about these images, and what the James Webb Telescope does, click here .

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