NASA's Webb Telescope Spots Galaxies Merging Around 'Monster' Black Hole...The next-gen instrument captures a rare, and rather extreme, cosmic scene.

CNet ^ | Oct. 24, 2022 12:35 p.m. PT | Monisha Ravisetti

[Telepathic Intruder]

"all these galaxies should be moving close to parallel"

Yes, that's right, at about 80% the speed of light due to cosmic expansion, which I'm sure they took into account. But is that our speed away from it, or its speed away from us? Both, actually. There is no absolute space/time reference frame, so they say.

[sit-rep]

I know I’m asking the practically impossible to answer to my liking, it just boggles my mind that they appear to be telling us they are that good at determining what is happening billions of light years away. I mean really... Say these 2 or 3 colliding galaxies are actually millions of light years apart and due to their SIZES they appear colliding with red shift detection but in actuality they are passing one another...

Billions of stars in these galaxies and in the past 10 or 20 years were not seeing mega supernovas out of this collision? Christ if a couple super suns out with their gravitational pulls colliding with each other should light up half the universe!!

[Telepathic Intruder]

To be fair, 11.5 billion light years is a long ways away. Even a quasar or a supernova is hard to spot with a telescope. But if that were happening in our own galaxy, we’d all lose our molecular cohesion. Joe Biden could not cause that much damage, if you can believe it.

[sit-rep]

Lol... I wouldn’t make that bet!!

[Bubba_Leroy]

But don’t you need to know what color it was to begin with?

We are talking about a galaxy as it existed over 11 billion years ago, less than 3 billion years after the universe first formed. The composition of that galaxy, including the number of red, yellow and blue stars, would affect the red/blue spectrum at the source, throwing off the baseline assumptions being made to calculate the velocity using the Doppler effect.

It seems like a lot of guesswork to me.

[Bubba_Leroy]

There is an awful lot of empty space between stars in most galaxies. I suppose it is possible for two galaxies to pass through each other or to merge into one without any stars colliding, particularly when you are talking about galaxies in the early stages of the universe, that may not have existed long enough for any super sized stars to form (e.g., lots of gas, but not a lot of stars).

[Telepathic Intruder]

It’s a little more complicated than just using the wavelength of light, since there is no way to tell for certain what it started as. Spectral signatures of elements like hydrogen and oxygen form the criterion for measuring the Doppler shift, since their absorption and emission spectra are always the same, so we assume. Fortunately, it’s easy to identify elements using their spectra from any distance across the universe.

[dragnet2]

you dont understand... if “Galaxies” that are millions of light years across like ours is.

Speaking of understanding, the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter, not millions of light years. Even in our own galaxy group which includes the massive Andromeda galaxy is only about 200,000 light years in diameter. Another in our galaxy group is M33 Triangulum Galaxy, and it only has a diameter of about 60,000 light years.

I captured this image of M33 Galaxy just last week. This object has little surface brightness and is not easy to capture. M33 is 3 million light years (18 Trillion Miles) away.

208x60 3hr/28mn

[dragnet2]

Btw, M33 above appears messed up or not too symmetrical, as it’s speculated M33 collided with Andromeda Galaxy billions of years ago.

[dragnet2]

Now that’s funny! The ruling class of the day would no doubt take full advantage of it.

[dragnet2]

I had always had this nagging question in my mind, other than navigation, what has astronomy done to improve our lives?

Space is the final frontier for man. The knowledge gained will be critical, if man lasts long enough to escape earth's demise one day.

[Telepathic Intruder]

That’s not bad at all. I suppose I could see M33 with my 80mm binoculars as a fuzzy dot. It’s 18 quintillion miles, btw. Two really messed up galaxies are the Magellanic clouds, which were once spiral but are now irregular due to their closeness to our own.

[dragnet2]

I hear under dark skies with near perfect conditions, 33 can just be seen with the unaided eye.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Maybe at high altitude too. No way near city lights.

[ModelBreaker]

“Now that’s funny! The ruling class of the day would no doubt take full advantage of it.”

Never let an emergency go to waste. And that would be the mother of all emergencies.