NASA: Webb Telescope Captures Spectacular Galactic Merger

Shining like a beacon amid a sea of ​​galaxies, Arp 220 lights up the night sky in this image captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

It is actually two spiral galaxies in the process of merging. The Arp 220 shines brightest in infrared light, making it an "ideal target" for the Web, reports N1.

It is an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG) with a brightness greater than a thousand billion suns.

By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy has a much more modest luminosity than about ten billion suns.

Located 250 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, Arp 220 is the closest ULIRG and the brightest of the three closest galactic mergers to Earth.

The collision of two spiral galaxies began about 700 million years ago. This caused a huge explosion of star formation. About 200 massive star clusters are located in a dense, dusty region about 5.000 light-years across (about 5 percent of the diameter of the Milky Way). The amount of gas in this region is equal to all the gas in the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Previous radio telescope observations have revealed about 100 supernova remnants on a surface less than 500 light-years away. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the cores of parent galaxies 1.200 light-years away.

Each of the cores has a rotating star-forming ring that emits the blinding infrared light so apparent in this Webb view.

This bright light creates diffraction spikes — the starburst feature that dominates this image.

On the periphery of this merger, Webb detects faint tails of gas, or material pulled by gravity from galaxies, represented in blue – evidence of the "galactic dance" taking place. Organic material represented in reddish-orange appears in fields across Arp 220.