The Hubble Space Telescope spotted galaxies colliding, with the smashup producing a long trail of new blue stars, streaming away from the nuclei of those galaxies, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced.
That awesome new find by the Hubble comes as the eye in the sky is reaching the ripe old age of 19.
And NASA is about to ensure that the Hubble continues to function for years to come: Space Shuttle Atlantis in a fortnight will blaze up from Kennedy Space Center at 1:31 p.m. ET May 12, and head to the Hubble.
American astronauts, using U.S. funds, will repair and refurbish the Hubble, giving it another five years of life until NASA places the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit.
The Hubble is a joint NASA-ESA project.
ESA reported on the latest Hubble find, a peculiar system of galaxies known as Arp 194. This interacting group contains several galaxies along with a cosmic fountain of stars, gas and dust stretching over 100,000 light-years.
Over the past 19 years, Hubble has taken dozens of exotic pictures of galaxies as they collide with each other and have a variety of close encounters of the galactic kind. But even by those standards, this cosmic collision is singular. In an image of a trio of galaxies, Arp 194, it looks as though one of the galaxies has sprung a leak. The bright blue streamer is really a stretched spiral arm full of newborn blue stars. This typically happens when two galaxies interact and tug at each other gravitationally.
Resembling a pair of owl’s eyes, the two nuclei of the colliding galaxies can be seen merging. The bizarre blue bridge of material extending out from the northern component appears to connect to a third galaxy, but in reality this galaxy is in the background and not connected at all. In instances where galaxies superficially appear to overlap, Hubble’s sharp view allows astronomers to attempt sorting out which objects are in the foreground and which are in the background.
The blue fountain is the most striking feature of this galaxy troupe and it contains complexes of super star clusters that may have as many as dozens of individual young star clusters in them.
It formed as a result of the interactions among the galaxies in the northern component of Arp 194. Gravitational forces involved in a galaxy interaction can enhance the star formation rate and give rise to brilliant bursts of star formation in merging systems.
Hubble’s resolution shows clearly that the stream of material lies in front of the southern component of Arp 194, as shown by the dust that is silhouetted around the star cluster complexes.
Details of the interactions among the multiple galaxies that make up Arp 194 are complex. The system was most likely disrupted by a previous collision or close encounter. The shapes of all the galaxies involved have been distorted by their gravitational interactions with one another.
Arp 194, located in the constellation of Cepheus, resides approximately 600 million light-years away from Earth. It is one of thousands of interacting and merging galaxies known to exist in the nearby universe. Hubble snapped those pictures of Arp 194 in January with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Blue, green and red filters were composited together to form the image of galaxy interaction.