Progress and the arrival of new technologies have allowed astronomy, the science that studies celestial bodies and phenomena that occur in outer space, perform more advanced research and discover 'strange' objects from the universe.
In this sense, a group of Chinese scientists, led by Mingyu Li, from the Tsinghua University of Beijing, It has been able to detect and identify a surprising galactic fusion between two collision ring galaxies. The finding has occurred fortuitously during some investigations in which tools such as the James Webb space telescope were being used, among others.
In his study, published in a research article available in Arxiv, it is explained that “deep images and spectroscopy reveal a complex system of annular galaxies of twin collisionthat exhibit an almost identical morphology. ”
A galactic fusion generates a surprising 'cosmic owl'
The most surprising thing about this discovery is that the fusion between the two galaxies has generated something that scientists have called 'cosmic owl', since The result of the collision has produced almost identical structureseach with a diameter of approximately 26,000 light years.
The cosmic owl
The symmetry is such that in the disseminated images you can see how The aforementioned collision has generated the one that looks like the face of an owlwith his eyes and his beak. This provision, according to researchers, has been given by the origin of the frontal impact between two galaxies with similar mass and structure.
The compact nucleus of each galaxy, in the images, forms what is the eye of the owl; While a central region of intense star formation, enhanced by younger star populations and nebular emission, creates what resembles a peak of the animal.
“The simultaneous occurrence of a frontal fusion, the formation of two rings, the dual activity of the active galactic nucleus and a stellar outbreak triggered by a stream offers a detailed snapshot of the mechanisms that assemble the stellar mass and make the supermassive black holes grow in the primitive universe,” they explain.
