Cosmic Dance Under the Eye of the James Webb Telescope

To celebrate two years of science observations from their space telescope, NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency have released an image of the interacting galaxy system Arp 142 taken by James Webb. Stunning.

Astronomers sometimes refer to them as the Penguin and Egg galaxies (tilt your head to see why). Located 326 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, Arp 142 is a system of strikingly interacting galaxies, one of whose members (NGC 2936, in red) is experiencing an active starburst. The two galaxies are separated by about 100,000 light-years.

According to a well-established scenario, it was the collision of NGC 2936 with the elliptical galaxy NGC 2937 (blue), 25 to 75 million years ago, that led to the formation of a series of new stars. In the world of galaxies, a collision is like a dance. As they come closer, the two stars are distorted by gravity. The stars leave their orbits, and gas and dust can be flung away, and through their compression, new stars are formed.

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Here, it’s the spiral galaxy NGC 2936 that has borne the brunt of the confrontation. Elliptical galaxies like NGC 2937 contain little gas. Their old stars have certainly been disrupted by NGC 2936’s gravity, but that hasn’t changed the galaxy’s overall appearance. Spreading out into intergalactic space where new stars are forming, the elliptical’s gas has instead completely transformed its silhouette.

The James Webb Space Telescope observes in infrared light. It shows (in red) the dust and carbon molecules heated by young stars and (in blue) the infrared portion of radiation from older stars. It also allows us to observe distant background galaxies, whose radiation is reddish due to cosmic expansion. At the top left of the image, the foreground galaxy PGC 1237172 is 100 million light-years away from Arp 142.