The photo taken by James Webb (Photo: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Armus, A. Evans)
Half a billion light-years away, in the Delphinus cluster, a pair of galaxies named II ZW 96 are in the process of colliding for years.
The space telescope recorded this with its lens and sophisticated infrared cameras, NIRCam and MIRI.
Webb's instruments recorded the mutual distortion between the two galaxies due to their gravitational pulls.
The already distorted "arms" of the lower galaxy, alongside the galaxy cores already connected to each other in the wake of stellar cradles, made II ZW 96 a tempting target for the sophisticated space telescope, as part of its great mission to understand the attraction of galaxies.
In video: NASA released first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (NASA)
The merging galaxy II ZW 96 is no stranger to NASA space scientists, and has already been recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope alongside observers on Earth, but Webb's new and special observation tools paint this union in new and deeper colors, as you can see in the image.
James Webb was launched in December 2021, and is already at the Lagrange point L2, a gravitationally stable point on the Earth-Sun axis about 1.5 million km away from us, which allows it to "hover" in place with a minimal investment of fuel.
The design and development of James Webb lasted more than 25 years, with an investment of about 10 billion dollars.
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