Galactic collisions are one of the biggest cosmic events in the universe. These events lead to a massive surge in energy.
A model of the spacecraft sits in the corner of the Operations Support Room. In this room, located inside the Hubble control center, engineers monitor activities being conducted with the spacecraft. (Photo: NASA)
The Hubble Telescope, which has been one of the biggest source of our information from the deep universe has now managed to scope another galactic event. The flying observatory captured a merger of three galaxies in a distant universe to form one mass of dust and bright swirling stars.
The distant galaxy merger has been dubbed IC 2431, which is 81 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. A thick cloud of dust obscures the center of this image though the light from a background galaxy pierces its outer extremities. Galactic collisions are one of the biggest cosmic events in the universe. These events lead to a massive surge in energy.
“The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, as well as a tumultuous mixture of star formation and tidal distortions caused by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio,” Nasa said. This image was captured during a series of Hubble observations investigating weird and wonderful galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.
The mass of dust and bright swirls of stars in this image are the distant galaxy merger IC 2431. (Photo: Nasa)
Astronomers used the telescope’s powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys to take a closer look at some of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers identified. The Galaxy Zoo project was the largest galaxy census ever carried out and relied on crowdsourcing time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies.
The telescope had earlier in February also captured a three-dimensional-looking image of two galaxies on the verge of a cosmic draw. The image showed an interacting galaxy pair that is composed of Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top). The interacting galaxy pair has been named Arp 282.
The agency in a statement said that both of the galaxies comprising Arp 282 have monumentally energetic cores, known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), although it is difficult to tell that from this image.
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