WASHINGTON - NASA released on Friday a pair of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showing two galaxies - one nicknamed the Penguin and the other the Egg - in the process of merging in sort of a cosmic ballet as the U.S. space agency marked two years since it unveiled the orbiting observatory's first scientific results.
Their interaction, according to NASA, was set in motion between 25 and 75 million years ago, and they are expected to become a single galaxy hundreds of millions of years from now.Webb has detected the earliest-known galaxies and has provided insight into areas such as the composition of planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, and the nature of star-forming regions in the cosmos.