Look at this amazing image from the James Webb Space Telescope! It shows two young stars forming and a mysterious question mark in the background. What do you think it is?
However, the most intriguing part of the image is a glowing red question mark that appears in the lower center. The object is not related to the protostars and is much farther away from them, possibly billions of light-years, according to Christopher Britt, an education and outreach scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute who helped plan these observations as reported byBritt’s best guess is that the question mark is a pair of galaxies that are merging.
David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University, says that our brains are wired to find patterns in random data and that there are many examples of serendipitous images in astronomy. For example, another pair of merging galaxies captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2008 also looked like a question mark, just rotated 90 degrees.
Helfand says that it is possible that the question mark is not one object but two or more that happen to align from our perspective. They could also be unrelated objects that have different distances from us. Britt cautions that estimating distance based only on colors can be misleading. The red color of the question mark could mean that it is very far away and its light has been stretched by the universe's expansion. Or it could mean that it is closer but obscured by dust near it.
To determine precisely how far away the question mark is, more observations are needed. One method is to measure its brightness through different filters and compare it with known objects. This would give an approximate distance, Britt says. Another method is to analyze its spectrum and identify its chemical composition. This would give a more precise distance but would require a different instrument than NIRCam.
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