In a dance of dark matter, NASA's deep-space observatory caught light being bent in the distant universe.
The massive James Webb Space Telescope mirror used a galaxy cluster's gravity to take a look at a known galaxy far behind, but there's a twist: the new research published Wednesday (Oct. 26) suggests Webb may be viewing two galaxies and not one. (The region has been imaged before by the Hubble Space Telescope, but this new view is sharper than ever.)
"We're actively discussing whether these are two galaxies, or two clumps of stars within a galaxy," Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Dan Coe, an instrument scientist for Webb's near-infrared camera, said in a NASA statement. "We don't know, but these are the questions that Webb is designed to help us answer."
Hubble saw the objects, found 10 years ago and called MACS0647-JD, as a "pale, red dot" formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang that kickstarted the universe, according to Coe. While Webb revealed that one object was actually two, the nature of what the new telescope is seeing remains a mystery.
Webb's team is committed to releasing science in progress and as such, this finding is not yet peer-reviewed and is still in early discussion. If Webb spotted two galaxies, there's an even more intriguing possibility: a galactic merger might be in progress in the early universe.
"If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic," said Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, a Ph.D. graduate student at john Hopkins University, in the same statement. But whether Webb is viewing two star clusters or two galaxies, there are clear differences between them: one object set is slightly bluer with lots of stars, and the other is slightly redder with lots of dust.