Cosmic 'question mark' baffles scientists
NASA telescope has detected a mysterious object in deep space. A space object shaped like a glowing question mark has become a photobomb in one of the latest images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, and scientists think they know what it could be.
Photo: webbtelescope.org
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 says.
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 origin 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 about the origin and composition of the object.
But they have a few ideas based on its shape and location, notes CNN.
< p>“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 tells you right away that it’s not a star,” he said of the question mark-shaped phenomenon.
It could be a merger between two galaxies that are probably billions of light-years away, much further than Herbig-Haro 46/47, said Christopher Britt, an education and public relations specialist in the public relations department of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Webb Telescope's science operations.
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 shapes—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 orbit around the galaxy, and the galaxy, made up of stars, moves in the direction that gravity pulls it.”
This integration is also the ultimate fate of our own galaxy, which will merge with the Andromeda galaxy approximately 4 billion years from now, Britt notes, but what form they will take is unknown.
The shape of the question mark could also “indicate a merger in which the two galaxies are gravitationally interacting,” Britt says. “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 sort of torn off and flown into space.”
According to experts, collecting more spectroscopic data about the object would reveal more details, such as its distance and chemical composition.
“However, no one is going to do this, because it is very similar to ”a local resident finds a chicken fillet, similar on George Washington,» Kaplan said. «But there are some observations you could make if you were motivated enough.»