It has been two years since the JWST reveal itsfirst science imagesand since then , the scope has contributed massively to furthering our savvy of the population near and far . From discoveringnew featuresin the atm of Jupiter to spotting themost distant wandflower yet , JWST deserve its accolades . To mark itssecond birthday , the charge team has released a glorious new figure of interacting glaxies with a very distinctive appearance .
The two interact galaxies are formally known asArp 142 ; thanks to their appearance it is one of the most famous conflux Galax urceolata out there . The pair are not fully merging yet , but they had a flyby encounter between 25 and 75 million years ago . That initial interaction head them to see like a penguin and an egg .
The Penguin ( individually cataloged as NGC 2936 ) is a former whorled galaxy , change form by the close enactment of the egg-shaped Egg ( NGC 2937 ) during their first qualifying . The galactic dance between the two dramatically altered the thinner portion of the penguin into its current shape . The gravitational effects on an oval coltsfoot are less obtrusive in comparison .
The Penguin and the Egg are locked in a slow cosmic dance as they merge, which will happen in hundreds of millions of years.Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
This is accentuated when figure in infrared light as it trace the effect of newly born stars . Galaxy fusion lead to the formation of stars as the gas is pulled and pushed under the influence of tidal power between the galaxies . Two particularly obvious place are what look like a Pisces in the Penguin ’s “ snoot ” and the “ feathers ” in its “ seat . ”
That ’s not all . Around these star - mould regions , there are dusty , wispy structures fat in carbon - based molecules , and there ’s dust ( the fainter , deeper orange arcs ) visible around the galaxy . elliptic Galax urceolata like the Egg tend to have an older population of stars and less available gas to form new ace . This is why it appears less unnatural by the gravitative dance known as galaxy merging . It is also less big in longer wavelengths sensitive to flatulency and dust .
The image is a snapshot of a merging process that will take another hundred million old age . The two extragalactic nebula will continue to vanish by each other , with the Penguin becoming more and more perverted as the Egg come and goes , eventually flux into a single elliptic object . A like fate await our galaxy , the Milky Way and its neighbor Andromeda , although that will take position in about 5 billion years .
The mid-infrared view of the system traces the dust and gas. The Egg is fairly poor in those components.Image Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
