A Galatic Triplex
The following is a great image of three galaxies colliding, which was captured by the Hubble telescope and is NASA‘s image of the day. The three galaxies are part of a larger 16 galaxy cluster and is called the Hickson Compact Group 90, which is approximately 100 million light-years away.
Though they are the largest and most widely scattered objects in the universe, galaxies do go bump in the night. The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed many pairs of galaxies colliding. Like snowflakes, no two examples look exactly alike. This is one of the most arresting galaxy smash-up images to date.
At first glance, it looks as if a smaller galaxy has been caught in a tug-of-war between a Sumo-wrestler pair of elliptical galaxies. The hapless, mangled galaxy may have once looked more like our Milky Way, a pinwheel-shaped galaxy. Now that it’s caught in a cosmic blender, its dust lanes are being stretched and warped by the tug of gravity. Unlike the elliptical galaxies, the spiral is rich in dust and gas for the formation of new stars. It is the fate of the spiral galaxy to be pulled like taffy and then swallowed by the pair of elliptical galaxies, which will trigger a firestorm of new stellar creation.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Sharples (University of Durham)
