NASA telescope discovers mysterious object in deep space

A NASA telescope has discovered a mysterious object in deep space. A space object shaped like a glowing question mark was a photobomb in one of the latest images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, and scientists think they know what it could be.

The original near-infrared image released on July 26 showed a pair of young stars named Herbig-Haro 46/47. Stars located 1,470 light-years away in the constellation Vela in the Milky Way galaxy are still actively forming and orbiting close together, CNN tells.

The two objects have been observed and studied by space and ground-based telescopes since the 1950s, but the high-sensitivity James Webb Telescope produced the highest resolution and most detailed image to date. It is capable of observing the universe with longer wavelengths of light than other space telescopes.

The Webb Telescope is shedding light on the origins of our universe, but the presence of this enigmatic object in the background of this image raises more questions than it answers. The cosmic question mark has not been closely observed or studied, so scientists are not entirely sure of the origin and composition of the object.

But they have a few ideas based on its shape and location, notes CNN.

“The very first thing you can rule out is that it’s a star in the Milky Way,” says Matt Kaplan, assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois. “Stars always have these really big spikes, and that’s because stars are like dots. It’s called diffraction, mostly from the edges of the mirrors and pillars that support something like a camera in the middle.”

The Webb Telescope can usually see six or eight stellar “prongs” if you look closely, Kaplan added. “It immediately tells you that it is not a star,” he said of the question mark-shaped phenomenon.

It could be a merger between two galaxies that are likely billions of light-years away, much further than Herbig-Haro 46/47, said Christopher Britt, an education and public affairs specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute’s public affairs office. which manages the scientific operations of the Webb Telescope.

There are “many, many galaxies outside of our own Milky Way,” notes Britt. “It’s like something you see quite often — as galaxies grow and evolve over cosmic time — which is that they sometimes collide with their nearest neighbors. And when that happens, they can be distorted into all sorts of forms – presumably including a question mark.”

This is likely the first time this particular object has been spotted, experts say, but question mark shaped galaxy mergers have happened before – including a reverse version formed by antenna galaxies in the constellation of the Crow. Also, according to Christopher Britt, most galaxies have had many interactions like this throughout their history, but they don’t last very long.

“It’s impossible to record anything in space,” Kaplan said. “The sun moves in an orbit around a galaxy, and a galaxy made up of stars moves in the direction in which gravity pulls it.”

This integration is also the ultimate fate of our own galaxy, which will merge with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4 billion years, notes Britt, but what form they will take is unknown.

The shape of the question mark could also “indicate a merger in which the two galaxies interact gravitationally,” says Britt. “That question mark hook at the top, in my opinion, is very similar to what we call a tidal tail, where the stream of stars and gas was kind of torn off and flew off into space.”

Gathering more spectroscopic data about the object would reveal more details, such as its distance and chemical composition, experts say.

“However, no one is going to do this because it is very much like ‘a local finds a chicken fillet that looks like George Washington,’” Kaplan said. “But there are some observations that you could make if you were motivated enough.”