Merging galaxies
Time for another cool image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by Hubble to study “the overall physical characteristics of galaxies and their star formation.”
What the picture however reveals best is the ongoing merger of three galaxies.
Arp 300 consists of two interacting galaxies, UGC 05028 (the smaller face-on spiral galaxy) and UGC 05029 (the larger face-on spiral). Likely due to its gravitational dance with its larger partner, UGC 05028 has an asymmetric, irregular structure, which is not as visible from ground-based telescopes but is quite distinct in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The bright knot visible to the southeast of the center of UGC 05028 may be the remnant of another small galaxy that is in the process of merging with that galaxy.
As always with Hubble galaxy images, there are a plethora of other background galaxies scattered about, including what appears to be another merger in the center right of two elliptical galaxies. In fact, except for one star in the lower right (with the four spikes), every other object in this photo is a galaxy of many shapes and distances.
Time for another cool image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by Hubble to study “the overall physical characteristics of galaxies and their star formation.”
What the picture however reveals best is the ongoing merger of three galaxies.
Arp 300 consists of two interacting galaxies, UGC 05028 (the smaller face-on spiral galaxy) and UGC 05029 (the larger face-on spiral). Likely due to its gravitational dance with its larger partner, UGC 05028 has an asymmetric, irregular structure, which is not as visible from ground-based telescopes but is quite distinct in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The bright knot visible to the southeast of the center of UGC 05028 may be the remnant of another small galaxy that is in the process of merging with that galaxy.
As always with Hubble galaxy images, there are a plethora of other background galaxies scattered about, including what appears to be another merger in the center right of two elliptical galaxies. In fact, except for one star in the lower right (with the four spikes), every other object in this photo is a galaxy of many shapes and distances.