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The James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning photo of two merging spiral galaxies that shine with the light of a trillion suns.

Humans won't be around to watch our Milky Way galaxy merge with its nearest neighbor Andromeda in a few billion years.

Thanks to the mighty James Webb, however, they get a front-row seat to the spectacle of another galactic merger, notes the Space site.

The merging of galaxies is a long process even by cosmic time scales.

Astronomers believe that the galaxies of Arp 220, which are spiral like the Milky Way, began merging 700 million years ago.

By comparison, the Milky Way galaxy will approach Andromeda in the next four to five billion years, and their merger will last 10 billion years.

"James Webb" showed unique pictures of Uranus

When Arp 220's galaxies began to merge, the abundance of gas and dust fueled intense star formation, with most concentrated in their dusty central regions. 

"The amount of gas in this small region is equal to all the gas in the Milky Way galaxy," the James Webb team wrote in a description of the image.

The powerful space telescope is not the first to "see" Arp 220. The merger of the two galaxies was also observed by the veteran Hubble telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

According to the description, the light of the object is equal to that of more than a trillion suns.

For comparison, the luminosity of our Milky Way galaxy is about 10 billion suns. 

To capture the image, "James Webb" used two high-tech tools - his main infrared camera NIRCam and MIRI, reports BTA.

Astronomers don't usually call two merging galaxies the same name.

Arp 220 is the 220th celestial object in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

Published in 1966 by American astronomer Holton Arp, the catalog lists 338 unusual galaxies whose shapes astronomers did not understand at the time.

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