The James Webb Space Telescope has captured an interacting galaxy pair, collectively known as Arp 142, to celebrate its two-year science anniversary.
Arp 142 is located 326 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hydra, about 130 times further away than Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor.
The individual galaxies in this pair are affectionately named Penguin (NGC 2936) and Egg (NGC 2937) because of their resemblance to the original.
Currently, the two individual galaxies in the pair are interacting, which started 25 to 75 million years ago. They will merge into a single entity over the next several hundreds of millions of years.
Before the cosmic encounter, the Penguin was a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, and the Egg was an elliptical galaxy.
The spiral galaxy has become significantly more distorted than the elliptical galaxy. The center of the spiral galaxy formed an eye, and its arms formed beaks, heads, spines, and fanned tails. However, the shape of the elliptical galaxy remains largely unchanged due to its compact structure and a lower amount of gas and dust.
The two individual galaxies, the Penguin and the Egg, are interacting because they are separated by only 100,000 light-years – relatively close in astronomical terms.
In contrast, our Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are separated by about 2.5 million light-years. They will also interact, but not before 4 billion years.
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