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Europe’s ultra-powerful new WEAVE telescope, undergoing its inaugural ‘first-light’ instrument activation, recorded a collision between galaxies in a region of deep space called Stephan’s Quintet, where one of the galaxies was traveling at two million miles per hour. Designed to study the composition of stars and galaxies, the William Herschel Telescope is a 20-million Euro collaboration between France, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, and Spain, with the latter hosting the actual facility in La Palma. The facility’s Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) wide-field spectrograph’s Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) is the first of the telescope’s instruments to be activated and...

NASA Shares the 5 Cosmic Targets of James Webb’s First Photos JUL 08, 2022 JARON SCHNEIDER James Webb Space Telescope NASA as revealed the cosmic objects that will be shown when it releases the first full-color photos captured by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12. The space agency says that the five targets listed below represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra that the James Webb Space Telescope has gathered and will mark the official beginning of the observatory’s general science operations. The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb...

Explanation: This wide, sharp telescopic view reveals galaxies scattered beyond the stars and faint dust nebulae of the Milky Way at the northern boundary of the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Prominent at the upper right is NGC 7331. A mere 50 million light-years away, the large spiral is one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier's famous 18th century catalog. The disturbed looking group of galaxies at the lower left is well-known as Stephan's Quintet. About 300 million light-years distant, the quintet dramatically illustrates a multiple galaxy collision, its powerful, ongoing interactions posed for a brief cosmic snapshot. On...