(ORDO NEWS) — The James Webb Space Telescope found a perfectly shaped question mark lurking in deep space near a pair of young stars called Herbig-Haro 46/47.
This is reported by FOCUS with reference to the Daily Mail.
It is not yet clear whether the universe really has a question for us. Experts say the nature of the giant question mark may be less scary than it seems. Perhaps this punctuation mark appeared as a result of the merger of two galaxies, one of which is stretched under the influence of the other’s gravity.
“There are billions of galaxies that we can observe in our part of the universe, and most of them are spiral or elliptical in shape. But, as with clouds on Earth, if you look at them for a long time, you can see anything,” says Stephen Wilkins, Head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Sussex.
The question mark was discovered by the telescope while mapping cosmic radiation, the background light left over from the Big Bang that formed the universe. The cosmic punctuation mark was discovered at the very top of the image from the Webb Telescope, which remains the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space. The uniqueness of this telescope is that it can see galaxies that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
The near-infrared image also shows the nascent stars Herbig-Haro 46/47, located 1,470 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sailfish. They are visible in the picture as a dusty blue nebula, which was located in the background.
“What we used to see as blurry blobs of indeterminate shape, we can now see in all the amazing detail, like complex clouds and filaments of gas and dust. Perhaps one day we will be able to look at this galaxy with such powerful telescopes that even its unusual shape will be lost in new details,” says the astronomer.
According to experts, the giant question mark in space was formed during the collision of two galaxies that are in the same gravitational field. The dot in this question mark is probably a large galaxy whose tidal forces pulled the smaller galaxy into a curved line.
Experts do not rule out that the object may also be simply two galaxies located in close proximity to each other. The red color of the question mark indicates that the object is located very far from us in space.
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