Seyfert's Sextet
From NASA’s Astronomy
Picture of the Day
What will survive this
battle of the galaxies? Known as Seyfert's Sextet,
this intriguing group of galaxies lies in the head portion of the split
constellation of the Snake (Serpens).
The sextet actually
contains only four interacting galaxies, though. Near the center of this Hubble
Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy
lies in the distant background and appears only by chance aligned with the main
group.
Also, the prominent
condensation on the upper left is likely not a separate galaxy at all, but a tidal tail of stars
flung out by the galaxies' gravitational interactions.
About 190
million light-years away, the interacting galaxies are tightly
packed into a region around 100,000 light-years across, comparable to
the size of our own Milky
Way galaxy, making this one of the densest known galaxy
groups.
Bound by gravity, the close-knit group may
coalesce into a single
large galaxy over the next few billion years.
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing: Judy Schmidt
