NASA's Webb may have just seen 2 galaxies merging in the early universe

It was thought to be the most distant in the universe.

He didn't know what he saw when he looked at the Hubble Space Telescope.

There is a musical score and a crash. Crawl, Crawl, Crawl...

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The revelation that Coe's space object might be two galaxies merging together is just one of many new discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope. In a new post from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, Coe describes the difference the new observatory has made. Scientists are talking about it.

If this is the most distant merger, Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao will be ecstatic.

Astronomer Dan Coe uses NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and a cosmic zoom lens to uncover a candidate for the farthest known galaxy in the universe. Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI

Scientists want to understand how the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe, estimated to be almost 13 billion years old. Light and other forms of radiation have to travel a long way to reach us. Human eyes can't see the light stretching into theIR, but Webb's mirrors can. The data is translated into colors by scientists.

More information about MACS0647-JD was revealed thanks to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The light from the distant system was magnified by the huge gravity of the cluster of galaxies. The effect made MACS0647-JD more visible, but it also scattered copies of the system at different scales.

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Rebecca Larson, an astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin who is part of the research team, said that before the birth of the universe, scientists only knew of a small number of stars.

She said that studying them can help us understand how they came to be.

The blue gas in the image is indicative of young star formation and little dust, while the red is older, according to researchers. The scientists want to know if these are two or two clumps of stars in one galaxy.

This isn't a long exposure. We haven't tried to use the telescope to look at many places.