"Cosmic Owl": James Webb Spots Rare Marvel Of Galaxy Collision
The Cosmic Owl is composed of two rare ring galaxies colliding, with each galaxy having a supermassive black hole at its centre, making them "active galactic nuclei". Scientists have used JWST data to spot the galaxy merger in the COSMOS field.
The researchers wrote in the paper that deep imaging and spectroscopy from JWST, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) or the Very Large Array (VLA) revealed a complex system of twin collisional ring galaxies, exhibiting a nearly identical morphology.
Mingyu Li, a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University in China and the new study's first author, said he and his co-authors discovered the object and presented it in a research paper published on the arXiv preprint server.
"We were analyzing all radio sources using public JWST data in a very well-studied region called the COSMOS field," Li told Live Science.
As per the report, he added that the colliding galaxy pair immediately stood out because of JWST's high-resolution imaging capabilities.
The collision occurred around 38 million years ago and is expected to remain visible for a long time, given that galactic collisions typically last a few hundred million years.
The collision triggered a massive burst of star formation in the "beak" region, transforming it into a "stellar nursery" where new stars are rapidly being born.
The Cosmic Owl's symmetry suggests a head-on collision between two galaxies of similar mass and structure, making it a unique and valuable discovery for astronomers.
"The simultaneous occurrence of a head-on merger, twin ring formation, dual AGN activity, and a jet-triggered starburst offers a detailed snapshot of the mechanisms that assemble stellar mass and grow supermassive black holes in the early universe," the researchers concluded
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