Since ancient times, humans have looked to the stars for answers to life’s biggest questions.
Now, new images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal a bizarre cosmic object that appears to be throwing a question of its own right back at us.
Spotted by JWST’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument, the object in question is a pair of distant galaxies being warped, magnified and multiplied into the shape of a cosmic question mark.
The scarcity of other objects like this one “makes this find exciting,” Desprez added, and it speaks to JWST’s power to see what prior space telescopes could not.
Related: 35 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images In this case, a gargantuan galaxy cluster called MACS-J0417.5-1154 is warping and enlarging a pair of tight-knit galaxies located far behind it.
(An unrelated galaxy forms the question mark’s lower dot.)
This was a time of rapid star formation, and many galaxies — including our own — were beginning to bulk up and take shape.
Seeing them allows astronomers to study what the Milky Way may have looked like eons ago, during its own stellar growth spurt.
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“Webb is allowing us to study what the teenage years of our own galaxy would have been like.”
The stars have long been a source of fascination for people seeking answers to the great mysteries of life. Recent photos taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show an odd cosmic object that seems to be asking us a question of its own.
This object, which was observed by JWST’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument, is a pair of distant galaxies that have been magnified, warped, and multiplied into the form of a cosmic question mark. NASA scientists said in a statement that gravitational lensing, a rare variation of a common cosmological phenomenon, is the cause of the phenomenon, not inquisitive aliens.
As part of the team behind the new image, Guillaume Desprez, an astronomer at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, said in a statement, “We know of only three or four occurrences of similar gravitational lens configurations in the observable universe.”. “This find is exciting,” said Desprez, adding that it demonstrates JWST’s ability to see objects that earlier space telescopes were unable to. This object is rare compared to others.
When a massive foreground object, like a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies, bends the light of objects behind it in relation to our view from Earth, this phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing. In addition to magnifying our view of background objects, the effect also distorts and multiplies them, creating a sort of cosmic spyglass.
See also: 35 incredible photos taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Here, two nearby, close-knit galaxies are being enlarged and warped by the massive galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154. Five times the original image of the two galaxies is displayed; four of the copies can be seen in the wavy body of the question mark, and the fifth one veers off to the lower right, as shown in the labeled image below. The bottom . of the question mark is formed by an unrelated galaxy. The researchers have named this specific formation a “hyperbolic umbilic gravitational lens.”.
According to NASA, the lensed galaxies are about 7 billion light-years from Earth and belong to a time when the universe was about half as old as it is now. At this period, galaxies, including our own, were starting to assemble and take shape as a result of the rapid star formation. Observing them enables astronomers to investigate possible early stages of the Milky Way’s stellar expansion.
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A fellow astronomer at Saint Mary’s University named Marcin Sawicki said in the statement, “These galaxies, seen billions of years ago when star formation was at its peak, are similar to the mass that the Milky Way galaxy would have been at that time.”. “Webb is enabling us to investigate what life would have been like in our own galaxy during its adolescent years. ****.
