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NASA’s space telescopes have captured a tale of cosmic horror in the making, two galaxies slowly creeping on each other before violently devouring one another in a cannibalistic merger.
The Webb and Hubble space telescopes joined forces to deliver the highest resolution image of a pair of spiral galaxies staring out from the darkness of space, appearing as a pair of murderous eyes soaked in blood.
The pair of galaxies shine in an eerie shade of red across the black background of the cosmos. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI The image, resembling an Alex Grey painting, is an omen of what’s to come. The two galaxies are on a path of collision, a process that will take millions of years. So far, the pair have only grazed one another, with the smaller galaxy on the left, cataloged as IC 2163, slowly creeping behind its larger counterpart, NGC 2207, the spiral galaxy on the right.
The blood-like hue of the image is owed to a combination of mid-infrared light from Webb with visible and ultraviolet light from Hubble, according to NASA. The bright red, veiny streaks in the image is where material from the two galaxies may have slammed together during their first pass of one another.
The two spiral galaxies have a high rate of new stars being born. Each year, the galaxies produce the equivalent of two dozen stars the size of the Sun, compared to the Milky Way galaxy, which only produces two or three Sun-like stars a year (amateur work, really). Both galaxies have also produced seven known supernovae within the past few decades, while the Milky Way hosts an average of one supernova every 50 years. The galaxies’ supernovae may have cleared space in their spiral arms, rearranging gas and dust which later cooled, allowing baby stars to form.
The galaxies’ star forming regions can be spotted in bright blue (courtesy of Hubble’s ultraviolet light capabilities) and pink and white (captured by Webb’s mid-infrared cameras). The image also shows mini starbursts, locations where a bunch of stars form in a quick succession, highlighted in other bright regions.
It took millions of years for the galaxies to make a first pass at each other, and it will take millions more for them to merge. Over that time, the galaxies will repeatedly swing by one another. Although we can’t be there to see it, the image helps us predict how the spiral galaxies may end up, and it’s not pretty. The cores and arms of the two galaxies will meld, creating oddly shaped arms, and a single, Eye of Sauron-type feature rather than having a pair of eyes sinisterly watching the surrounding universe.
We’re noticing a lot more spooky stuff in the universe today. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) captured a shadowy silhouette of a wolf, or it might also be a horse, in the constellation Scorpius near the centre of the Milky Way.
The Dark Wolf Nebula was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO. The fittingly nicknamed Dark Wolf Nebula (again, I’m still seeing a horse) is located around 5,300 light years away from Earth, and stretches across an area equivalent to four full Moons in the sky, according to ESO. Dark nebulae are scary stuff, massive, cold clouds of cosmic dust that obscure the light of stars behind them, and do not emit any visible light of their own.
NASA’s Perseverance rover also spotted an eye from Mars. This might be a little less spooky and a lot more silly, but Mars’ tiny, potato-shaped moon Phobos passed directly in front of the Sun from the rover’s perspective, blocking a part of the Sun’s disc and creating the most adorable googly eye peering down at Perseverance.
The Martian googly eye may not be as frightening as pair of cannibalistic, blood-soaked eyes or a mysterious dark wolf (or horse) appearing as a giant celestial shadow, but it’ll do for now.
