A pair of galaxy-crossed lovers.
Two galaxies, both alike in spiral-ness, are locked in a few hundred million-year battle ripping stars, dust, and gas out of their host galaxies, forming a streaming arc connecting the two, creating the namesake of these two galaxies, the Antennae Galaxies.
This feud is captured by NASAHubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and from past observations show the battle in brilliant color, with star-forming regions in blue and gas in bright pink and red. The 65 million light-year away galaxies are in a state of starburst – when all the gas within the galaxies creates stars – a cosmically brief time of tens of millions of years. The gravitational attraction between the two galaxies will eventually cause them to merge, forming a large elliptical spiral galaxy.
Image description: Bright blue, pink, and red clash as the two galaxies meet. The top galaxy is almost fully elliptical at the center of the image, with plumes of red and brown escaping its core, c...
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