Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Antennae Galaxies in Collision
NASA
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble NASA
Sixty million light-years away toward the southerly constellation Corvus, these two large galaxies are colliding.
The cosmic train wreck
captured in stunning detail in this Hubble
Space Telescope snapshot takes hundreds of millions of years to
play out.
Cataloged as NGC 4038
and NGC 4039, the galaxies' individual stars don't often collide though.
Their large clouds of
molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near
the center of the wreckage.
New star clusters and
interstellar matter are jumbled and flung far from the scene of the accident by
gravitational forces.
This Hubble close-up
frame is about 50,000 light-years across at the estimated distance of the
colliding galaxies.
In wider-field views their suggestive visual appearance, with extended structures arcing for hundreds of thousands of light-years, gives the galaxy pair its popular name, The Antennae Galaxies.