NASA specialists have shared a very impressive image of a unique spiral galaxy called NGC 6872, which was made by the advanced James Webb space telescope. This galaxy is fundamentally different from our own Milky Way galaxy, representing a jumper with two “stellar tails” emerging from opposite ends of this cosmic structure. But the uniqueness of the galaxy is not only that it has an extremely non-standard shape, but also in size – scientists are sure that NGC 6872 is the largest spiral galaxy in the Universe.
Experts said that the size of NGC 6872 in diameter (that is, from the beginning of one “tail” to the end of the other diagonally) is 522,000 light-years. This means that this galaxy is more than five times the size of the Milky Way, but the statement about the largest spiral galaxy in the Universe is made with the footnote “discovered at the moment”, since the Universe is poorly understood and is constantly expanding, so no one can say for sure can not. At the same time, thanks to NASA’s newest telescope for $ 10 billion, specialists managed to capture the entire galaxy by publishing the image in the public domain – now anyone can look at this unique phenomenon.
For such manipulations, astronomers had to use a trick – they photographed individual parts of the NGC 6872 galaxy, after which they combined the frames into a single grid in the visible spectrum, using additional information about the far ultraviolet and infrared ranges from the European Southern Observatory telescope and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The result was a very impressive image of a distant galaxy, which before the launch of James Webb seemed impossible, because the spiral galaxy NGC 6872 is located at a distance of 212 million light-years from Earth.
Scientists also explained why this galaxy looks the way it does. It’s all about the gravitational interaction of the spiral galaxy NGC 6872 with the neighboring disk galaxy IC4970, the mass of which is five times less than its “big” neighbor. Typically, such gravitational interactions lead to a galactic merger, when a large galaxy “devours” a smaller neighbor, but in this case the usual scenario was violated.
“Understanding the structure and dynamics of the interaction of these systems brings us closer to the moment when scientists will be able to understand the context of the formation of new young galaxies,” the authors of the project said.
Source: Trash Box
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