After months of speculation and guesswork, it’s finally here. The mystery of the cosmic question mark immortalized by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023 has been solvedIt wasn’t designed by aliens, as some good people have suggested, but by them.Interaction between two galaxies (One red and one spiralBoth are 7 billion light years away.) To which is then added a third, unrelated galaxy which, due to a strange perspective effect, forms the point at the bottom of the arc..
This is evident from the new images taken by the same telescope of the US, European and Canadian space agencies. Published In one studio on the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The mysterious question mark silhouette was spotted not far from two young stars in the making. (Shiamat Herbig Haro 46/47) In the constellation Vela, about 1,470 light-years from Earth.Although this region has been previously observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the dusty red galaxy that forms the question mark arc has only been seen in Webb images.
“Both question mark galaxies show active star formation in different compact regions, possibly due to gas colliding from the two galaxies.“However, neither galaxies appear to have a very irregular shape, so we may be witnessing the beginning of their interaction,” says study lead author Vicente Estrada Carpenter, an astronomer at Saint Mary’s University in Canada. “These galaxies, which were observed billions of years ago when star formation was at its peak, are similar in mass to what the Milky Way would have had at that time,” adds astronomer Marcin Sawicki of Saint Mary’s University. “We need to study what our galaxy’s teenage years would be like.”
Reproduction © Copyright ANSA
“Internet trailblazer. Travelaholic. Passionate social media evangelist. Tv advocate.”