Galaxy mergers are a spectacularly beautiful phenomenonRecently the famous Hubble space telescope captured an impressive photograph, although it was not the only one, James Webb also captured a ghostly galaxy.
A ghostly bright spot that was captured by ground-based observatories and disappeared in images from the Hubble Space Telescope has reappeared as a faint galaxy in a James Webb image, while Hubble recovered the merger that occurred in the VV689 system that was nicknamed “Angel Wing.”
Hubble and James Webb discover new galaxies
Astronomers from the COSMOS-Web collaboration have identified the object AzTECC71 as a dusty star-forming galaxy. Or, in other words, a galaxy that is busy forming many new stars but is shrouded in a veil of dust that is difficult to see through, almost a billion years after the Big Bang.
These galaxies were once thought to be extremely rare in the early universe, but this discovery, as well as that of more than a dozen additional candidates in the first half of the COSMOS-Web data that have not yet been described in the literature science, suggests they could be three to 10 times more common than expected. If that conclusion is confirmed, it would suggest that the early universe was much dustier than previously thought.
A dusty star-forming galaxy is difficult to see with optical light because much of the light from its stars is absorbed by a veil of dust and then remitted at redder (or longer) wavelengths. Before JWST, astronomers sometimes referred to them as “Hubble dark galaxies,” a reference to the space telescope that was previously the most sensitive.
A new lineup
Unlike chance alignments of galaxies that only appear to overlap from our point of view on Earth, the two galaxies in VV689 are in the midst of a collision. Although we are very amazed by these types of events due to the colossal images they give us, in reality galactic collisions are not strange, these interactions are currently occurring in multiple events in the universe.
In reality, all large galaxies have been formed by different collisions and interactions with smaller galaxies in events that last billions of years and this interaction gives them the particular formation pattern that we observe. The interaction between these components of the cosmos is attributed to one of the most important forces in the universe that explains much of its formation, gravity, which reaches its maximum expression to allow the approach and subsequent collision of galaxies.
Likewise, it is believed that they have a very important connection with the birth of stars since their collision is accompanied by bursts of star formation, although the estimation of their effect is still questioned.