Exploring the Antennae
From NASA’s Astronomy
Picture of the Day
Some 60 million
light-years away in the southerly constellation
Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding.
The stars in the two
galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the
course of the ponderous cataclysm, lasting hundreds of millions
of years.
But their large clouds
of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering
furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic
wreckage.
Spanning about 500
thousand light-years, this stunning composited view also reveals new
star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational
tidal forces.
The remarkable
collaborative image is a mosaic constructed using data from small and large
ground-based telescopes to bring out large-scale and faint tidal streams,
composited with the bright cores imaged in extreme detail by the Hubble Space
Telescope.
Of
course, the suggestive visual appearance of the extended arcing
structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae.
Image Data: Subaru, NAOJ, NASA/ESA/Hubble, R.W. Olsen - Processing: Federico Pelliccia and Rolf Wahl Olsen