Nasa released on July 12 a pair of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope showing two galaxies in the process of merging.
“We see two galaxies, each a collection of billions of stars. The galaxies are in the process of merging. That’s a common way that galaxies like our own build up over time, to grow from small galaxies - like those that Webb has found shortly after the Big Bang – into mature galaxies like our own Milky Way,” said Ms Jane Rigby, Nasa Webb senior project scientist.
The Penguin galaxy, so dubbed because its shape from the perspective of the telescope resembles that flightless bird, including a beak-like region, is formally called NGC 2936. It is a spiral-shaped galaxy, now a bit distorted. 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.