Credit & Copyright: Dave Doctor
Explanation:
The colorful, spiky stars
are in the foreground of this image taken with a small telescope
on
planet Earth.
They lie well within our own
Milky Way Galaxy.
But the two eye-catching galaxies in the frame lie far beyond the Milky Way,
at a distance of over 300 million light-years.
The galaxies' twisted and distorted appearance is due to
mutual gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters.
Cataloged as Arp 273 (also as
UGC 1810), these galaxies do look
peculiar,
but interacting galaxies are now understood to be
common in the universe.
Closer to home, the large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is known to be
some 2 million light-years away and
inexorably
approaching
the Milky Way.
In fact the far away peculiar galaxies of Arp 273 may
offer an analog of the
far
future encounter
of Andromeda and Milky Way.
Repeated galaxy encounters on a
cosmic timescale ultimately result in a merger into a single galaxy of stars.
From our perspective,
the bright cores of the Arp 273 galaxies are
separated by only a little over 100,000 light-years.
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NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
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Публикации с ключевыми словами:
interacting galaxies - взаимодействующие галактики
Публикации со словами: interacting galaxies - взаимодействующие галактики | |
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