Spiral Galaxy NGC 4038 in Collision
From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of
the Day
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.
