The James Webb Space Telescope has captured an incredible image of the Ring Nebula. For now the source of this symbol in the sky remains a cosmic mystery.Webb Telescope captures dying star known as the Ring Nebula Given the number of intriguing targets spotted by JWST, the question mark may never receive this treatment. Spectroscopy, which analyzes light from the source to determine its elemental makeup, could provide a more exact distance but requires a separate instrument to measure. This could be done by measuring photometric redshifts, determined by the brightness observed through different filters, but this would only provide an estimate for the distance, Britt says. It would take more investigation to identify exactly how far away the question mark is. The red of the question mark could mean it’s very far away (light waves stretch as they travel through the expanding universe, shifting to redder wavelengths) or that it’s closer and obscured by dust near the object. They could also be completely unrelated objects, he says, if one is much closer to Earth than the other.īritt warns that estimating distance based only on colors in the image can be tricky. Helfand says the question mark seems to be two objects, the curve and the dot, but could be more that just happened to line up. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University) Photograph by NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration and A. Right: This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows two spiral galaxies (collectively identified as Arp 256) in the early stages of merging. Two merging galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 also look like a question mark, just turned 90 degrees. The sheer number of shining objects we find are bound to create some serendipitous images, and our brains have evolved to find those patterns, he says.Īstronomers have seen similar objects closer to home. It's a question mark … But you can find the colons and semicolons, and any other punctuation mark, because you have 10,000 little smudges of light in each image taken every half hour,” says David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University. The curve of the question mark might be the “tails” being stripped off as the two galaxies spiral toward each other. There are two brighter spots, one in the curve and the other in the dot, which could be the galactic nuclei, or the centers of the galaxies, Britt says. The hints pointing to two galaxies are found in the question mark’s strange shape. “That includes our own galaxy, the Milky Way … will merge with Andromeda in about four billion years or so.” “That's something that's seen fairly frequently, and it happens to galaxies many times over the course of their lives,” he says. His best guess is that the question mark is actually two galaxies merging. The object is far outside our galactic neighborhood, possibly billions of light-years away, says Christopher Britt, an education and outreach scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute who helped plan these observations. The telescope’s astonishing sensitivity allowed the glowing red question mark to be captured in the lower center of the image.
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