UNITED STATES, — NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the world's largest and most powerful space telescope, and Friday marked the second anniversary of the telescope's science operations.
Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has revolutionized astronomy with breathtaking images that allow researchers to unravel the mysteries of the universe.
With Friday marking its two-year anniversary, what better way to celebrate than with a new stellar image of the universe?
The observatory operated by NASA and the European Space Agency photographed the two galaxies 326 million light-years away, surrounded by a blue haze of stars and gas.
The neighboring galaxies, nicknamed Penguin and the Egg, have been tangled up for tens of millions of years, according to NASA. They'll eventually merge into a single galaxy.
To talk about this new image and some of Webb's latest discoveries, 10TV spoke with NASA expert Jane Rigby.
"For the second anniversary, we've got two galaxies, a penguin and an egg," said Rigby. "That's what it looks like to our eyeballs, anyway. What's really going on here are two galaxies, not that far away, that are interacting. They're gravitationally you know, the gravity of each other is pulling on them, and it's twisting and warping and distorting that red galaxy. So that looks kind of like a penguin. So you know, it was a normal spiral galaxy, it's getting unwrapped and twisted."
Rigby said they are just getting started with the discoveries made from this telescope, but that the past two years have seen a flood of discoveries coming back.
"We have been able to show that the galaxies in the early universe are bigger, brighter and have bigger black holes than we expected. We've been able to find more than 1,000 galaxies that we are seeing as they looked when the universe was less than one billion years old," said Rigby.
To find out more about the Webb Telescope and its thousands of discoveries, keep up with the latest at NASA.gov/webb.