Antennae Galaxies: stellar fireworks accompanying galaxy collision | 20/01/1996 | ||
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This
Hubble Space Telescope image provides a detailed look at a brilliant "fireworks
show" at the center of a collision between two galaxies. Hubble has
uncovered over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life as a result
of the head-on wreck.
Click here for an animation of the formation of the Antennae Galaxies. |
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Image Credit: Brad Whitmore (STScI), and NASA | |||
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This
Hubble Space Telescope image provides a detailed look at a brilliant "fireworks
show" at the center of a collision between two galaxies. Hubble has uncovered
over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life as a result of the
head-on wreck.
[Left] A ground-based telescopic view of the Antennae galaxies (known formally as NGC 4038/4039) - so named because a pair of long tails of luminous matter, formed by the gravitational tidal forces of their encounter, resembles an insect's antennae. The galaxies are located 63 million light-years away in the southern constellation Corvus. |
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[Right] The respective cores of the twin galaxies are the orange blobs, left and right of image center, crisscrossed by filaments of dark dust. A wide band of chaotic dust, called the overlap region, stretches between the cores of the two galaxies. The sweeping spiral- like patterns, traced by bright blue star clusters, shows the result of a firestorm of star birth activity which was triggered by the collision. | |
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