NASA Telescopes Capture Colliding Spiral Galaxies in Sparkling DetailNEWS | 31 December 2025I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes.
Two space telescopes really are better than one. This month NASA released a new image that combines observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory of two spiral galaxies on a cosmic collision course.
The two space telescopes have very different trajectories—giving them each a heady vantage point on the universe. JWST orbits the sun and observes the cosmos in infrared light, whereas Chandra, which orbits Earth, is sensitive to the x-ray spectrum. The newly released image combines their observations into one, revealing the galaxies IC 2163 (the left-hand galaxy) and NGC 2207 (on the right) in a new light.
The pair are located some 120 million light-years from Earth. The larger galaxy, NGC 2207, is slowly stretching and stripping the smaller of the pair. Together they are joined in a slow, gravitational dance that will, billions of years from now, end in their merger into a single galaxy. In the image, mid-infrared data from JWST shows dust and other cooler matter in white, gray and red, while x-ray data from Chandra shows high-energy areas, including regions of intense star formation, in blue.
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When galaxies merge, they can trigger explosive bursts of star formation, and astronomers are keen to observe these collisions to understand how galaxies evolve over time.Author: Sarah Lewin Frasier. Claire Cameron. Source
