This galaxy is having a bad millennium.
In fact, the past 100 million years
haven’t been so good, and probably the next billion or so will be quite
tumultuous. Visible on the upper left, NGC 4038 used to be a normal spiral
galaxy, minding its own business, until NGC 4039, toward its right, crashed
into it.
The evolving wreckage, known famously as
the Antennae, is pictured above. As gravity restructures each galaxy, clouds of
gas slam into each other, bright blue knots of stars form, massive stars form
and explode, and brown filaments of dust are strewn about. Eventually the two
galaxies will converge into one larger spiral galaxy. Such collisions are not
unusual, and even our own Milky Way Galaxy has undergone several in the past
and is predicted to collide with our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few
billion years.
The frames that compose this image were
taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope by professional astronomers to
better understand galaxy collisions. These frames — and many other deep space
images from Hubble – have since been made public, allowing an interested
amateur to download and process them into this visually stunning composite.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment