- The James Webb Space Telescope continues to impress with its unprecedented views of the universe.
- A new picture shows the wreckage of two galaxies crashing into each other.
NASA has released a stunning new image from its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that shows an ancient cosmic crash in unprecedented detail.
Galaxy NGC 3256 may look like a straightforward spiral galaxy to the untrained eye, but this peculiar cosmic object still carries scars from its tumultuous beginnings.
"This distorted galaxy is the wreckage of a head-on collision between two spiral galaxies which likely occurred 500 million years ago," according to a post on NASA's JWST Flickr account Tuesday.
Thanks to its powerful infrared cameras, JWST was able to peer into the heart of the galaxy, which is located about 120 million light-years away.
Spiral galaxies are expected to look like orderly spirals. But NGC 3256 is chaotic. It has tendrils shooting straight out of the center of the galaxy and very bright clouds of shining dust and stars.
That's because the crash caused two gas clouds to violently merge into each other, producing the raw materials needed to create stars. That led to "an enormous burst of star formation," the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement about the image.
Because these stars are relatively new, they "radiate enormously brightly in infrared wavelengths," per ESA. These are clearly visible in the JWST image, shining brightly in orange and red.
The image also shows that while most of the existing stars survived the crash, some were violently ejected from the galaxy, per NASA.
These created "tidal features" which are seen in the dark grey halo surrounding the bright orange dust.
This halo should be more or less a sphere, but in the image above, it stretches out at the upper left and bottom right. This is where stars were sent away from their home galaxy.
The pathway from JWST to NGC 3256 can be seen in the video below, showing the telescope gradually zooming into the galaxy.
Scientists will be looking at these images to understand what happens when two galaxies collide. This could help solve the mystery of how supermassive black holes can grow to billions of times the size of the sun, per Space.com.