Hubble telescope captures image of 2 galaxies colliding

quote:

---

The image above shows a pair of intertwined galaxies known as NGC 6052, located some 230 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules the Son of Zues (aka the Strongman). Though these dueling dynamos were initially discovered way back in 1784 by none other than the famed astronomer William Herschel (the man who discovered Uranus), at the time, they were thought to be a single, oddly shaped irregular galaxy.

This new image of NGC 6052 was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed during Hubble Servicing Mission 4 in 2009. Though Hubble used the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to photograph NGC 6052 back in 2015, this new snapshot reveals a much more detailed view of the extragalactic fender bender.

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the collision taking place in NGC 6052 will fling countless individual stars into wide new orbits. Eventually, the stars from each starter galaxy will intermingle to the point where the initial shape of two original galaxies will no longer be clear.

---