A new image produced by the James Webb Space Telescope reveals new details of Stephan's Quintet, the very first compact galaxy group ever discovered.
the Flying Horse, was discovered by the French astronomer Édouard Stephan in 1877 at Marseille Observatory and is the most studied of all the compact galaxy groups.
But to call it a galaxy"quintet" is a bit of a misnomer, for the largest and brightest of the five — catalogued NGC 7320 — is merely an innocent bystander. While the other four galaxies — NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319 – are located at roughly 290 million light-years away and form a true galaxy group, NGC 7320 is much closer to us at"only" 39 million light years.
In contrast, those other four galaxies are so close together that they have begun to interact with each other. They are bound by gravity and will eventually merge into one large elliptical galaxy in several million years. In fact, two of these galaxies — NGC 7318A and NGC 7318B — have already started to consolidate. The subsequent collision has drawn out long, sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars from each galaxy, in turn triggering massive bursts of star formation.
Initially, however, the difference in distance between the assemblage of four of the galaxies in the Quintet versus the much closer fifth galaxy produced a conundrum among cosmologists and astrophysicists. Those four galaxies that are clustered together show a large redshift, corresponding to a recessional speed of 4,000 miles a second. But galaxy NGC 7320, showed a redshift indicating a much slower speed of just 491 miles per second.
So, if all five galaxies were physically related, then using redshift to determine stellar distances — which indicated that one galaxy of the Quintet is much closer compared to its other four companions — might be flawed. American astronomer Halton Arp was one of those who believed for a long time that this was indeed the case.
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