About 500 million years ago two spiral galaxies began colliding with one another. The collision is still in progress and was captured by the Hubble Telescope. Known as the Antennae Galaxies, this area of space is now the birthplace of billions of new stars.
Antenna Galaxies - Image by NASANASA's interpretation of this image...
Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.
This image is helping astronomers learn more about how stars form in a galactic collision and will help them predict what will happen when our own Milky Way Galaxy collides with the Andromeda Galaxy a few million years from now.
Get a much closer look using a zoomable image of the
Antenna Galaxies at the NASA website.
Labels: Astronomy-Planets
