{"id":216288,"date":"2025-06-20T02:17:16","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T07:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/the-cosmic-owl-astronomers-discover-a-peculiar-galaxy-merger"},"modified":"2025-06-20T02:17:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T07:17:16","slug":"the-cosmic-owl-astronomers-discover-a-peculiar-galaxy-merger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/the-cosmic-owl-astronomers-discover-a-peculiar-galaxy-merger","title":{"rendered":"The Cosmic Owl: Astronomers discover a peculiar galaxy merger"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-cosmic-owl-astronomers-discover-a-peculiar-galaxy-merger.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a peculiar merger of two similar ring galaxies that morphologically resemble an owl\u2019s face. The discovery of this galaxy merger, dubbed the \u201cCosmic Owl,\u201d is <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2506.10058\" target=\"_blank\">presented<\/a> in a research paper published June 11 on the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n<p>Galaxy mergers play a crucial role in the evolution of galaxies. These events redistribute the gas around galaxies, impact the stellar kinematics, transform galaxy morphology, and eventually lead to effective stellar mass assembly.<\/p>\n<p>Some <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/galaxy+mergers\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">galaxy mergers<\/a> lead to the formation of collisional ring galaxies (CRGs), which are relatively rare as only a few hundred of them have been detected in the local universe. Rings in such galaxies are created when one galaxy passes directly through the disk of another in a nearly head-on collision, causing gas and stars to be shocked outward into a circular or near-circular pattern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An international team of astronomers reports the detection of a peculiar merger of two similar ring galaxies that morphologically resemble an owl\u2019s face. The discovery of this galaxy merger, dubbed the \u201cCosmic Owl,\u201d is presented in a research paper published June 11 on the arXiv preprint server. Galaxy mergers play a crucial role in the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}