Astronomers Spot an Extremely Rare Galaxy Mega-Merger

JWST Image of Stephan's Quintet of galaxies, the left of which (NGC 7320) is much closer to Earth than the other four galaxies in the image. Credit - NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Scale in the universe is hard to understand from a purely human perspective. Many times the math just doesn’t sit well with our brains that evolved to capture and process data about the world around us rather than groking the complexities of stellar dynamics and galaxy mergers. But every once in a while astronomers find something that, if we can wrap our heads around the numbers, gives a sense of just how big the universe is. That is precisely what a new paper, available in preprint on arXiv from a group of astronomers led by Z.L. Wen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hopes to do when it describes a merger of not one, not two, but six supermassive galaxies and the active dynamics they’re subject to.

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