The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently spotted a rare cosmic phenomenon known as the "Cosmic Owl". This structure is formed by the collision of two ring galaxies, each approximately 26,000 light-years wide and located about 11 billion light-years away from Earth.
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.
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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.
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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
