Hey there, little space explorer! Guess what? Astronomers have discovered something super cool! They found two galaxies crashing into each other in pictures taken by the fancy James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). And get this, these galaxies are really, really old, like younger than 500 million years after the big bang. That’s like finding the oldest candy in the universe!

Galactic Collision: Oldest Candy in Space!

• One clever student named Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, who goes to Johns Hopkins University, led the team that made this discovery. But before that, another astronomer named Dan Coe spotted one of the galaxies called MACS0647-JD with another telescope called Hubble. MACS0647-JD looked like a tiny red speck back then. It was so far away that its light got all stretched out by the universe’s expansion, making it look red.
• MACS0647-JD is a really weird-looking galaxy. It’s shaped like a lopsided peanut, with two clumps of stars on different ends. Scientists think it’s actually two galaxies that started out separate but are now merging into one big happy family.
• They named the clumps “A” and “B.” Clump A is bluer and has lots of baby stars, while clump B is redder and dusty, with fewer new stars. It’s like one clump had a star party while the other clump decided to take a nap.
• Some scientists are not 100% sure if MACS0647-JD is really two galaxies crashing into each other or if it’s just a funky galaxy with a strange star history. But most of them agree that the research and analysis done by the team are pretty convincing.
• To be absolutely sure, they need to observe MACS0647-JD in longer wavelengths and check if it has gas tails connecting the two clumps. Unfortunately, the big telescope that could help with that is in the Southern Hemisphere, and MACS0647-JD is up in the Northern Hemisphere.
• But guess what? There’s more! The universe is full of crashing galaxies, especially when we look really far back in time. The JWST has already found lots of ancient galaxies, just like MACS0647-JD, that the Hubble missed. So we’re going to learn even more about how our universe grew up and became the amazing place it is today.
• Isn’t that just out-of-this-world exciting? Keep dreaming big, little space adventurer, and who knows, maybe one day you’ll discover something even more mind-blowing in the universe!